Leveraging a review of the book The Cleanest Race,by B.R. Meyers into a launching point for an otherwise interesting essay on the totalitarian nightmare of North Korea, Christopher Hitchens makes one "mistake." Suggesting he agrees with the author's assessment, he says, "Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right."   

From the traditional American conservative point of view, such an assessment is a mistake because American conservatism, rightly understood, seeks to preserve the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers and the Constitutional limitations on government that they devised for the express purpose of preventing the rise of just the horrible type of totalitarianism now extant in North Korea.

But it is only the semblance of a mistake, because traditional American conservatism has largely been supplanted in the modern American mind with the warped and twisted notions of neo-conservatism, a doctrine, by contrast, that does not have a problem with expansive government power. Consequently, if we understand "conservatism" from a neocon point of view, then Meyers and Hitchens are right — North Korea is indeed "a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right." And that says a lot about the nature of neo-conservatism.

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