Richard Goldstein weighs in on homocons on both sides of the pond.
excerpt:
Now that he's pushing up tulips, conservatives have rushed to rehabilitate Fortuyn. Here in the States, he's been embraced by neocons as a martyr, the Matthew Shepard of the managerial class. All the more reason to pin Pim's politics down.
Was he a fascist? Not as we understand the word (though fascism might be facilitated by his rise). But he certainly was a right-winger. In America, any conservative could run on his platform, stripped of its planks on personal liberty. Fortuyn advocated slashing the public sector, cutting taxes, and cracking down on crime. Substitute African Americans for immigrants as Fortuyn did, could hope to lead the party of Ollie North. Imagine a politician who made a positive issue of his homosexuality getting a serious crack at the White House.
It was Fortuyn's good fortune to be a citizen of the world's only free state for gay people. But that doesn't mean his perspective was uniquely Dutch. Beyond his immigrant bashing, Pim had much in common with an American homocon like Andrew Sullivan. Both men rose in the liberal media of their countries by professing to be talking common sense, not ideology. Yet both belong to a new kind of conservatism that springs from the love that dare not vote Republican.
