Francis Fukuyama Endorses Barack Obama
Prominent neoconservative intellectual Francis Fukuyama endorsed Barack Obama in an article published Wednesday at The American Conservative.
Fukuyama offers little to no real arguments for his choice, aside from it being “hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush.”
In Fukuyama’s opinion, voters should punish the Republican Party for Bush’s presidency and mistakes. If they do not, he says, politicians will repeat the same mistakes time and again.
“While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale,” he writes.
Interesting about Fukuyama’s column is that he seems to forget that Democrats have controlled U.S. Congress for two years. In addition to that, they not Republicans were the ones who blocked any attempt to regulate financial institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These institutions stand at the very core of today’s crisis, because they handed out loans to people who could not afford them.
Meanwhile, Obama is receiving increasingly more endorsements from Republicans who believe that the Republican Party has failed to live up to its responsibilities, which could spell tremendous trouble for that party in the years to come. A massive reshuffle will undoubtedly take place in the coming months, possibly resulting in an ideological bloodbath.
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Is this the “we have cancer and need radical surgery” approach?
Is it just me or does it seems that conservatives (and probably liberals) are overly concerned about movement “purity”?
I noticed that Fukuyama confirms a suspicion I’ve had about all of these conservatives coming out for Obama- that part of their unwillingness to stick with the GOP seems to stem from wounded pride after backing Bush and then having to live with the consequences.
Despite what a lot of people think about the neocons though, this doesn’t strike me as an unusual convert in this case. Neoconservatives aren’t an extreme form of conservative, and in fact their movement grew out of liberalism, not conservatism (they allied with the GOP when the Dems proved to be too pacificistic and non-interventionist.) I don’t know what Fukuyama’s economic philosophy is, but I wouldn’t doubt that his domestic policy preferences might line up more with the Democratic party anyway. It’s the fiscal paleoconservatives who are jumping ship to back Obama that confuse- and irritate- me.
Christine: neoconservatives are quite liberal when it comes to domestic issues.
Neo’conservative’ is actually not a correct term for them.