Conservatives caricatured Third World corruption claims to discredit the NIEO agenda.

Evidence

Bhagwati noted the emergence of increasingly prominent critics of the NIEO who sought to discredit the G-77 agenda by denouncing developing country governments: “the argument that ‘we cannot allow ourselves to be pushed around into giving aid to an undeserving, corrupt Third World’ has several adherents in fashionable intellectual circles in the United States. This attitude of hostility to developing countries has been reinforced by the subtle but propagandistic caricaturing of the positions of developing countries in regard to the NIEO by conservatives and neoconservatives alike in the United States. Ignoratio elenchi is a favorite fallacy of intellectuals who are prominent, rather than eminent; it works very well in its intended purpose, but it must be exposed” (1977, 10). In the event it is not clear which “prominent rather than eminent” intellectuals Bhagwati is targeting in this passage, the reader is referred to a clarifying footnote: “Variations on this basic theme have appeared in articles by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Peter Bauer, and others, in American magazines such as Commentary” (Bhagwati 1977, 23). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1778

Categorization

• XREF: Links the Mont Pèlerin network’s attack on the NIEO to the broader neoconservative ascent in Commentary, connecting to Mirowski/Plehwe’s account of think-tank influence.
• SEED: Angle: how intellectually prominent-but-not-eminent commentators used the ‘corrupt Third World’ caricature to hollow out aid legitimacy — a case study in the political work of a rhetorical device.
• QUESTION: When did Commentary host Bauer’s and Moynihan’s anti-aid pieces, and did the Mont Pèlerin Society coordinate them?