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Neo-Conservatism
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| Spin Doctor |
| Does some kind soul fancy explaining to me why the American right is referred to as neo-conservatism as of late? |
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| occrider |
Oy, I should let Vesa handle this one since he is the resident expert :). But in brief, conservatives and the neo-conservatives are not the same thing. Despite the fact that some of their policy decisions overlap they do possess distinct differences that they disagree on. I would say that Bush is NOT a neo-conservative although many in his cabinet are neo-conservatives and after 9/11 they've managed to influence him more into subscribing to some of their policy beliefs. At any rate, the Christian Science Monitor wrote a fairly decent summary article on who they are. This should hold you over until Vesa unleashes his library of information on you.
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/neocon101.html |
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| YaleTrance |
I rarely visit this forum, but i think i should do so more because I am a political science student. This topic is particularly close to my field of interest. I wrote a paper for school about the ideological evolution of foreign policy in America in a class about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and it's all about the fluctuations of power btw. the cons. and neo-cons. Here it is:
The ideological evolution of American foreign policy in the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Until the end of the Cold War in the last decades of the Twentieth century, America's Middle East policy was a relatively marginal part of its global grand strategy, which focused on preventing and deterring the Soviet Union from intimidating or conquering U.S. allies in Western Europe and East Asia. Britain was historically the dominant Western power in the Middle East until the 1960s, and U.S. influence was countered in much of the region by the Soviet Union until practically the end of the Cold War as a consequence of the bipolar sphere in the mapping out of the balance of power. The indifference of much of the national security elite and the public to the region- in between exceptions such as the main crises like the 1967 war- facilitated the domination of U.S. policy and the shaping of its broad ideological approach to the region by two extremely powerful U.S. domestic lobbies- the Israel lobby and the oil industry. The merging of these two different interest groups based on economic and ethnic concerns are still considered as being instrumental foundations in the US foreign policy towards the Middle East. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites created a power vacuum which has been filled by the United States, first in the Persian Gulf following the Gulf war, and now in Central Asia as a result of the Afghan war. Today the Middle East is becoming the center of U.S. foreign policy- a fact clearly illustrated by the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent War on Terrorism that was catalyzed by such events. These historical circumstances that were catapulted by the fall of the Soviet Union and the September 11 attacks a decade later paved the way for the ideological evolution of American foreign policy from traditionalist and realist conservatism to the now dominant neo-conservative movement, which currently controls the principal realms of foreign policy in President Bush’s administration and his subsequent handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
According to Michael Lind in Distorting U.S. Foreign Policy: The Israel Lobby and American Power, the disproportionate influence of the Israel lobby distorts U.S. foreign policy in a number of ways that alter the principal American rationale and approach to the region in a heavily biased manner (Lind 28). Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, enabled by U.S. weapons and money, inflames anti-American attitudes in Arab and Muslim countries. The expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land makes a mockery of the U.S. commitment to self-determination for Kosovo, East Timor and Tibet. The U.S. strategy of dual containment of Iraq and Iran pleases Israel—which is most threatened by them—but violates the logic of ‘realpolitik’ and alienates most of America's other allies. Beyond the region, U.S. policy on nuclear weapons proliferation is undermined by the double standard that has led it to ignore Israel's nuclear program while condemning those of India and Pakistan. The culprit for this double-standard is clearly the historical achievements of the Jewish American lobby and the historical circumstances that accompanied them. According to Lind, the U.S. has a responsibility and commitment to support Israel's right to exist within internationally recognized borders and to defend itself against threats. He claims that what is needed is a debate between those who want to link U.S. support for Israel to Israeli behavior, in the light of America's own strategic goals and moral ideals, and those who want there to be no alliance at all. In his authoritative study about the American-Jewish lobby called Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Smith), Tony Smith explains that “to be a ‘friend of Israel’ or ‘pro-Israel’ apparently means something quite simple: that Israel alone should decide the terms of its relations with its Arab neighbors and that the U.S. should endorse these terms, whatever they may be. The principal role of the Jewish American lobby should be to pressure the U.S. government to ensure their compliance with this “pro-Israel” stance.
The Israel lobby is one special-interest pressure group among many that work in the nation’s capital to pressure government officials into following their agenda. It is composed by a loose network of individuals and organizations, of which the most important are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The Israel lobby is not homogeneous throughout the diverse Jewish-American community. Many Jewish-Americans are troubled by Israeli policies and some actively campaign against them, while some non-Jewish Americans—most of them members of the Protestant right—play a significant role by supporting the lobby. Even pro-Israel groups differ on the question of Israeli policies and there are diverse factions within their ranks. Lind quotes Matthew Dorf in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to explain this divided outset: “The Zionist Organization of America lobbies Congress to slow the peace process. Their allies are mostly Republicans. At the same time, the Israel Policy Forum and Americans for Peace Now work to move the process along. Democrats are most sympathetic to their calls. (Lind 45)”.
The Israel lobby is united not by a consensus about Israeli policies but by a consensus about U.S. policies toward Israel. Most of the disparate elements of the pro-Israel coalition support two things. The first is massive U.S. funding for Israel. As Stephen M Walt writes in International Security (Winter 2001/02), “In 1967 Israel's defense spending was less than half the combined defense expenditures of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria; today Israel's defense expenditure is 30 percent larger than the combined defense spending of these four Arab states.” Israel receives more of America's foreign aid budget than any other country—$3 billion a year, two-thirds in military grants (total aid since 1979 is over $70 billion).
Along with aid, the Israel lobby demands unconditional U.S. diplomatic protection of Israel in the U.N. and other forums. To a degree, this is justified; the U.S. has been right to denounce the ritual “Zionism-is-racism” rhetoric of various kleptocracies and police states. The U.S., however, has been wrong to block repeatedly efforts by its major democratic allies in the U.N. Security Council to condemn Israeli repression and colonization in the occupied territories. It is difficult to prove direct cause-and-effect connections between the power of a lobby and America's foreign policy positions. But, in the Middle East, it is hard to explain America's failure to pressure Israel into a final land-for-peace settlement—particularly since the Oslo deal in 1993—without taking into account the Israel lobby. The influence of the lobby may be easier to detect in the way U.S. positions have shifted on more specific totems of the conflict. For example, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories were regarded as illegal during the Carter administration. Under Reagan, they shifted to being an “obstacle” to peace and are now just a complicating factor. Similarly, East Jerusalem was considered by the U.S. to be part of the occupied territories but recently its status has become rather more ambiguous.
The Israel lobby, however, is not primarily a traditional ethnic voter machine; it is an ethnic donor machine. Unique among ethno-political machines in the U.S., the Israel lobby has emulated the techniques of national lobbies based on economic interests (both industry groups and unions) or social issues (the National Rifle Association, pro- and anti-abortion groups). The lobby utilizes nationwide campaign donations, often funnelled through local so-called “astroturf” (phony grassroots) organizations with names like Tennesseans for Better Government and the Walters Construction Management Political Committee of Colorado, to influence members of Congress in areas where there are few Jewish voters.
Stephen Steinlight, in an essay for the Center for Immigration Studies, describes how the Israel lobby uses donations to influence elected officials: “Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete…the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel (Steinlight).” Steinlight adds: “For perhaps another generation… the Jewish community is thus in a position to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas.” Steinlight is the recently retired director of national affairs at the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
As well as campaign contributions, the Israel lobby's power is exercised through influence on government appointments. Until recently, Democrats and Republicans differed in their attitude to the lobby but now both parties are significantly influenced by it, although in different ways.
Historically, Jewish Americans have been part of the Democratic coalition, and they remain the only white ethnic group which consistently votes overwhelmingly for Democrats. By contrast, between Eisenhower and the elder Bush, many Republicans shared the attitude attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to a former Republican secretary of state: “F--- the Jews. They don't vote for us anyway. (Lind)” Influenced by big business and the oil industry in particular, Republicans often tilted toward the Arabs (although this means support for the Arab regimes, not voiceless Arab populations such as the disenfranchised Palestinians).Although Nixon, a known anti-Semite in his personal attitudes, rescued Israel in the 1973 war, Eisenhower infuriated the Jewish-American community by thwarting the joint seizure of Egypt's Suez Canal by Israel, Britain and France in 1956 (Tivnan). Another Republican president, George Bush Sr., enraged the Israel lobby during the Gulf war by pressuring Israel not to respond to Iraq's missile attacks, choosing not to occupy Baghdad and promising America's Arab allies that the U.S. would push Israel on the Palestinian issue, a bargaining strategy that is still being used to this day. According to Lind, the elder Bush was the last president to criticize the lobby publicly, in September 1991, when he complained that “there are 1,000 lobbyists up on the Hill today lobbying Congress for loan guarantees for Israel and I'm one lonely little guy down here asking Congress to delay its consideration of loan guarantees for 120 days(Lind)” The Democrats exploited this split between the Israel lobby and the first Bush administration. In an address to AIPAC in May 2000, presidential candidate Al Gore recalled, “I remember standing up against Bush's foreign policy advisers who promoted the insulting concept of linkage, which tried to use loan guarantees as a stick to bully Israel. I stood with you, and together we defeated them (Lind)”.
The Clinton presidency brought about a stronger relationship with the lobby than ever before when the President appointed Martin Indyk, a veteran of a pro-Israel think-tank associated with AIPAC, as the ambassador to Israel. Nonetheless, Clinton (and Indyk) took the Palestinian cause seriously, and the U.S. administration did push Israel further than it wanted to go on some issues prior to the Wye River agreement and in the failed Barak-Arafat negotiations. But the fact that so many of the senior U.S. administration officials involved in those failed negotiations had ties to the Israel lobby raised troubling questions about the ability of America to act as an honest broker. Furthermore, leading members of the Israel lobby encouraged and paved the way for what Lind considers as the greatest abuse of the presidential pardon power in American history—Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich, a fugitive billionaire on the FBI's Most Wanted List who had surrendered his U.S. citizenship rather than pay the taxes he owed. The Israeli and Jewish-American establishments successfully lobbied Clinton to pardon Rich, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the former head of Mossad and the head of the U.S. Anti-Defamation League (many of the same individuals also supported a pardon for the imprisoned American spy for Israel, Jonathan Pollard). In a New York Times op-ed in February 2001, Clinton claimed he had done it for Israel: “Many present and former high-ranking Israeli officials of both major political parties and leaders of Jewish communities in America and Europe urged the pardon of Mr. Rich because of his contributions and services to Israeli charitable causes, to the Mossad's efforts to rescue Jews from hostile countries, and to the peace process through sponsorship of education and health programs in Gaza and the West Bank. (New York Times Feb. 2001).”
Most Jewish Americans were initially politically hostile to George W. Bush, whose alliance with the Christian right disturbs them. Yet the younger Bush has, in practice and “realpolitik”, been influenced more by the Israel lobby than by the oil lobby. The State Department of Colin Powell, who has described himself as a “Rockefeller Republican” and supports Palestinian statehood, has rapidly lost influence to the Defense Department, where a cadre of pro-Israel hawks allied with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has seized the initiative (Ponnuru). Richard Perle, chairman of Bush's quasi-official Defense Policy Board, co-authored a 1996 paper with Douglas J. Feith for the Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” it advised Netanyahu to make “a clean break from the peace process.” Feith now holds one of the most important positions in the Pentagon: deputy-under-secretary of defense for policy, consolidating the hold of power of the neo-conservative movement in Bush’s foreign policy approach to the region. Feith argued in the National Interest in 1993 that the League of Nations mandate granted Jews irrevocable settlement rights in the West Bank. In his essay from 1997 titled “A Strategy for Israel,” Feith encouraged Israel to re-occupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control” even though “the price in blood would be high.”, suggestions that could now be seen as prophetic in light of Prime Minister Sharon’s approach to the conflict.
The radical Zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in Republican policymaking circles and ideological formation, championed by their neo-conservative perspective and its introduction into the mainstream of American politics. This is indeed a recent phenomenon that dates back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish intellectuals joined the broad Reagan coalition with anti-communism as the greatest common factor (Kimmage). While many of these hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the chief concern of many such “neo-conservatives” is the preservation and protection of the power and reputation of Israel. William Kristol, editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard, explained the reason for the rhetoric about global democracy to the Jerusalem Post (July 27, 2000): “I've always thought it was best for Israel for the U.S. to be generally engaged and generally strong, and then the commitment to Israel follows from a general foreign policy.” This hawkish stance of the neo-conservative Jewish right is not wholeheartedly compatible with the liberalism and Democratic partisanship of most Jewish Americans, forcing these Zionist extremists to find its popular constituency in the Protestant evangelical right of Pat Robertson and others-many of whose members share the Christian Zionism of the early British patrons of Israel (Kampfner).
In order to understand this new ideological alliance and odd convergence of sociopolitical forces in support of Israel it would be convenient to analyze the domestic critics of the neo-conservative movement and the Jewish lobby. By contrasting the two extreme sides of anti-Israel criticism (from both the left and the right) along with the mainstream reaction of the average politician and citizen, one might comprehend the neo-conservative rationale that so firmly supports the actions of the state of Israel. In the extreme right, the most outspoken critic is Patrick Buchanan, who claims that a "neoconservative cabal" is running American foreign policy in the interests of Israel (Shapiro). Buchanan is a longtime opponent of the neo-conservatives, and his leading supporters have been drawn from the ranks of the paleo-conservatives. Since the emergence of neo-conservatism-a name and movement defined by Irving Kristol in the 1960s-paleo-conservatives have claimed that the neo-conservatives were not true conservatives. They were simply liberals who, without relinquishing their liberal mindset, had moved to the right as a result of the excesses of the Great Society and the perilous status of the state of Israel. Area of contention between the paleo- and the neo-cons concerned foreign policy. Buchanan and his fellow paleos were essentially isolationists. They rejected President Bush's "new world order," were skeptical of foreign aid, the World Bank, and the United Nations, and dissented from the moralistic thrust of net-conservative foreign policy pronouncements. The paleos were particularly antagonistic to proposals by the net-conservatives that Washington should seek to spread democracy throughout the world. This worship of democracy, Buchanan said in May, 1991, was "liberal idolatry masquerading as conservative orthodoxy," and he called the National Endowment for Democracy, a government agency which had been strongly supported by net-conservatives, the "Comintern of the net-conservatives." By contrast, Buchanan described himself as a "neo-isolationist." He favored the ending of foreign aid, the removal of the United Nations from the United States, the closing of the World Bank, the imposition of high tariffs, and the reduction or ending of immigration, both legal and illegal. In his famous article "America First-and Second, and Third," published, interestingly enough, in Kristol's The National Interest, Buchanan called for a new nationalist and isolationist foreign policy purged of net-conservative "globaloney." Buchanan's opposition to Desert Shield, Desert Storm and recently to Operation Iraqi Freedom was a logical outgrowth of his isolationism and the struggle within the conservative movement. The war against Iraq, he contended, was an example of net-conservative foreign policy in action, and he referred to defenders of both of the Bush's policy as "net-conservatives." Buchanan claimed that the major interest of the net-conservatives had always been Israel. "This Commentary crowd . . . didn't come around to our way of thinking," he told conservatives in 1983, "until the Soviet threat to Israel became apparent." His facts were wrong, for Commentary had been strongly anti-communist since its founding shortly after World War II. (Shapiro).". The far right paleo-conservative leaders charge their denunciations of Israel and the Israel lobby with rants against secular humanists, homosexuals, feminists, Third World hordes and other alleged enemies of a white Christian America. The lunatic fringe represented by the militia movement that spawned domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh refers to the federal government as ZOG—the Zionist-Occupied Government. This kind of demonology is also found among black nationalists, like Louis Farrakhan of the Nations of Islam. For Buchanan and the paleo-cons, conservatism should be rooted on Christianity and moral values first and foremost. They view neo-conservatives with distrust because they are seen as embracing secular humanism and modernity as much as their liberal counterparts, displacing the priority in common moral values that historically characterized the conservative movement.
Critics on the left, like Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, are not taken seriously outside of left-wing academic circles because their condemnations of U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East are seen as part of ritualized anti-American denunciations of all U.S. foreign policy everywhere. It is not exaggerated to state that, if the far right hates Israel mainly because it hates Jews, the far left hates Israel mainly because it hates America. With critics like Chomsky, Buchanan and Farrakhan, the Israel lobby has had a relatively easy time persuading most Americans that critics of Israel are lunatic-fringe figures. Israel has also been fortunate in its Palestinian enemies. Yasser Arafat is no patronized figure like Gandhi or Mandela. In America, Palestinian suicide bombers are indistinguishable from the al-Qaeda fanatics in their tactics, though not from their cause, and footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets on learning of the September 11 attacks appalled and disappointed Americans otherwise sympathetic to the goal of Palestinian independence.
Susanne Klingenstein observes that the Republicans' strong support for Bush's expensive war on terrorism and their unabashed and unapologetic sympathy for an Israel terrorized by suicide bombers were the first undeniable indicators to what degree the ideas of that "little Sacred Band," whom the traditional conservatives fought tooth and nail to keep at bay, had within fourteen years come to determine the agenda of the conservative rank and file (Klingenstein). "[T]he neocons are no longer a wing of the conservative movement," stated The New Republic in July 2002, "they are the conservative movement. Supply-side economics, Israel, welfare reform, vouchers — all the old neocon pet causes have become enshrined in conservative conventional wisdom. As Norman Podhoretz declared in The New York Times in 2000, 'The time has come to drop the prefix and simply call ourselves conservatives.(Klingenstein)'" Klingenstein claims that the adherents to the Old Right have been overtaken by the fate Russell Kirk prophesied not too long ago for those traditionalists: some died, some merged (most notably the conservative icon William F. Buckley), and those who hang on to paleo ideas, as does Buchanan, have become pretty much irrelevant.
The kind of informed, centrist criticism of Israel which can be found in Europe and other parts of the developed world is a criticism that recognizes Israel's right to exist and defend itself, while condemning its brutal occupation of Palestinian territory and discrimination against Arab Israelis, is a rhetoric and approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict that is far less visible in the United States. Michael Lind assures that what is needed at this moment in American and world history is a responsible criticism of the U.S. Israel lobby which, unlike the left critique, accepts the broad outlines of U.S. grand strategy as legitimate and which, unlike the critique of the far right, is not motivated by an animus against either Jewish Americans or the state of Israel as such. This balanced approach to the conflict is the most logic evolution in the American ideology and rationale regarding the conflict, which will certainly not abandon its neo-conservative undertones, but could definitely embrace a more fair and balanced solution to the conflict. By endorsing the current road map and apparently taking the lead in the quest for Palestinian statehood as the right solution, President Bush will have the responsibility to prove whether or not this balanced approach is truly compatible with the neo-conservative foreign policy and rationale that dominates the American ethos in the present day.
Kampfner, John The British neoconservatives, New Statesman, 13647431, 5/12/2003,
Vol. 132, Issue 4637
Kimmage, Michael. Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey and the Complicated
Origins of the Neo-Conservative Movement: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Jewish Studies, Spring2003, Vol. 21 Issue 3, p48, 16p
Klingenstein, Susanne, Shofar "It's Splendid When the Town Whore Gets Religion and
Joins the Church": The Rise of the Jewish Neoconservatives as Observed by the
Paleoconservatives in the 1980s , :An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies,
08828539, Spring2003, Vol. 21, Issue 3
Lind, Michael. Distorting U.S. Foreign Policy: The Israel Lobby and American Power.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. 87554917. May, 2002. Vol. 21.
Miglietta, John P. American Alliance Policy in the Middle East, 1945-1992. Rowan &
Littlefield Publishing. Septembet 2002.
Ponnuru, Ramesh. Getting to the Bottom of this ‘Neo” Nonsense. National Review.
6/16/2003. Vol. 55. Issue 11.
Shapiro, Edward S. Pat Buchanan and the Jews. Judaism. 00225762. Spring 1996. Vol.
45. Issue 2.
Tivnan, Edward. The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy.
Touchstone Books. Reprint Edition. Oct. 1998 |
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| Izzy |
| Interesting as usual. YaleTrance, i'm going to print that off and read it tomorrow in class (shame on me). ill see if i have something to comment on it later. |
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| YaleTrance |
| quote: | Originally posted by Izzy
Interesting as usual. YaleTrance, i'm going to print that off and read it tomorrow in class (shame on me). ill see if i have something to comment on it later. |
great, please feel free to comment on anything i wrote. sorry for not separating the paragraphs, i was too lazy to fix the copy paste. |
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| occrider |
| YaleTrance, I just skimmed it real quickly and it looks like an excellent paper. Hopefully I'll have time to read it and get into it fully tomorrow while I'm at work (shame on me too). My only criticism is that it seems very disjointed. It would help if you underlined/bolded your thesis in your thesis paragraph and constructed each subsequent paragraph to coincide with your primary thesis points established in your thesis paragraph. And naturally each paragraph should have a header sentence tying in the overall thesis with the established arguments in the paragraph. Sorry, it looks to be a very good paper :), I'm just anally retentive when it comes to the structure of papers. I was 1 class away from being a history major, and as such, I was subjected to a very specific style of writing papers. Perhaps that same style doesn't apply to pol sci papers ... :D |
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| YaleTrance |
| quote: | Originally posted by Vesa
Gonna revive it this week with reviews of a dozen Neocon books, and also plan to post a link collection to several dozens of articles I've found since the Iraq War. Hopefully those reviews and articles will be more impartial than my own analysis in this thread ;)
Neocons' political location on the map and the nobility of Neocon foreign policy are largely a matter of focus and semantics. Just like Stalinists and Trotskyists claimed to own Communism, very many competing groups now claim to own Rightist politics.
I'm personally passionate about Isolationist Nationalism and Rightist Realism, so that's why it's hard for me to see Neocons as genuine Rightists at all. This is because Neocons support internationalist Machtpolitik, which happened to be the central pillar of Socialism in the 20th century, so they look to me like mirror images of Communists in some respects. One explanation may be that any imperialist policy soon falls outside the Leftist-Rightist map altogether. |
One thing i learned when i did my studies in Amsterdam last year was how sharp the contrast between American and European political thought is today. While American academia likes to empiricize and quantify everything, Eurpeans still rely on qualitative methods in the analysis of political theories. I personally like the qualitative approach better, and you summarize it pretty well, but Americans would mostly say that this kind of explanations are irrelevant and not very practical. |
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| YaleTrance |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
YaleTrance, I just skimmed it real quickly and it looks like an excellent paper. Hopefully I'll have time to read it and get into it fully tomorrow while I'm at work (shame on me too). My only criticism is that it seems very disjointed. It would help if you underlined/bolded your thesis in your thesis paragraph and constructed each subsequent paragraph to coincide with your primary thesis points established in your thesis paragraph. And naturally each paragraph should have a header sentence tying in the overall thesis with the established arguments in the paragraph. Sorry, it looks to be a very good paper :), I'm just anally retentive when it comes to the structure of papers. I was 1 class away from being a history major, and as such, I was subjected to a very specific style of writing papers. Perhaps that same style doesn't apply to pol sci papers ... :D |
hehe i know, i wrote this about 3 months ago, but i still have to fine tune a few things. thanks for the idea. |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by YaleTrance
hehe i know, i wrote this about 3 months ago, but i still have to fine tune a few things. thanks for the idea. |
Well, if it helps any, the style I was taught to write papers was as such: The thesis paragraph should be no more than one page or so and should be to the point. A very high level analysis that should include no details. Your actual thesis should be no more than once sentence. Following your thesis sentence you should provide a sentence for each of the supporting arguments that make up your thesis. A real basic example: Thesis - The root causes of WW1 stem from the alliance system, the arms race, and supra-nationalism that dominated early 20th century mentality. The alliance system blah blah thesis statement 1. The arms race blah blah thesis statement 2. Nationalim blah blah thesis statement 3.
Then that is your thesis paragraph in its entirety. With each subsequent paragraph I would then begin the argument with a tie in to the thesis. So for the second paragraph (tying in with thesis statement 1) you would remind the reader of the objective of your paragraph. In that respect the reader maintains a clear focus of the point you are conveying and ties that point in with your overall objective. And then so on with each additional point.
Crap ... I went from sober to drunk in the time I wrote this. Alright sorry for the lecture ... good luck on your grade. I'll try to actually comment on content tomorrow :cool:
Edit: And if anyone wants to argue WW1 with me that would be in awesome ... my favorite topic to study. |
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| Yoepus |
You know tahiti was running an English 101 course the other day in a Palestinian thread.
Now we have Prof.(in training) Occrider teaching Rhetoric 101 in a neocon debate, wow talk about Trance U (or is that U. of Trance?)!
;) |
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| daffodil |
| quote: | Originally posted by Yoepus
You know tahiti was running an English 101 course the other day in a Palestinian thread.
Now we have Prof.(in training) Occrider teaching Rhetoric 101 in a neocon debate, wow talk about Trance U (or is that U. of Trance?)!
;) |
could i get a spot as a guest lecturer to preach the value of concise writing and esoteric grammar, a la journalism nazi? unfortunately, all history professors don't care for my writing because it isn't "flowery" enough :p
yaletrance, i'll be reading and critiquing your paper sometime in the near future as well. |
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