Neo-Cons again
A nice piece by Michael Lind on the Nation site. (Link via Hit and Run).
Lind opens by somewhat jokingly answering the semi-serious suggestion that there is no such thing as the neo-conservatives, and anyone who says there is, is an anti-Semite. He makes it clear it still makes sense to speak of a small number of people--related to a remarkable extent by work experiences, and even marriage--who are the leading neo-cons. They might differ from each other in private, even on some fairly major issues, but they do a good job of maintaining a united front so as to maximize their effectiveness.
Lind has worked closely with them. He says matter-of-factly that Rumsfeld and Cheney are neo-conservatives, so there is no need to come up with a special term for non-Jewish neo-cons. (He later says there is an ethnic and regional mix that roughly goes back to the New Deal).
Quite possibly I am wrong about that. I just keep thinking about the magazine article about dull young Rumsfeld, and dull Cheney, and Cheney's 10 years as Congressman for Wyoming, and the fact that the president who really elevated these two was Gerald Ford, the dullest of the dull.
Lind has worked for Irving Kristol, still apparently the "godfather" of them all. (Lind describes Kristol at one point as "the former publisher of a magazine called The National Interest, of which I was executive editor from 1991 to 1994.") He says he left the movement when it became friendly with Christian fundamentalism. He objects to:
"the ever-deepening alliance of the neocons with the Likud's major supporters in the American electorate, the Protestant ayatollahs of the Bible Belt, which inspired Irving Kristol, William Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to open their magazines to religious-right tirades against abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and--my personal favorite--'Darwinism.' This apertura to Southern Christian fundamentalism--the opposite of everything that neoconservatism defined as 'paleoliberalism' once stood for--led to my departure and that of several other former neoconservatives. We thought we had joined an antitotalitarian liberal movement, not an alliance of American Likudniks and born-again Baptist creationists brought together to support the colonization of 'Samaria' and 'Judea' by right-wing Jewish settlers."
As this passage also suggests, Lind also objects to the neo-ons' doctrinaire support of a pro-Likud, even pro-Sharon view on Israel and the Palestinians. But he insists the neo-cons are not defined primarily by their view of Israel. They want to spread a "national greatness" view of American patriotism all over the world, using military invasion as one of the key tools, if not the most important tool, to do so. Lind claims this is where the Trotsky influence is most apparent: patriotism is really just a vehicle to spread a universal revolutionary ideology by means of force.
The neo-cons' support for one particular "pro-Israel" view is in fact a contradiction of their view of the United States. The United States offers a nationality for all the nationalities, a country of immigrants. The Likud view of Israel is that it should be united by blood as well as soil--the very view that is most likely to be regarded as hostile, in fact as a declaration of war, by people of Arab ancestry in Israel and the surrounding territories. An alternative view is that Israel should accept representation by population.
Clarity of terms: as a rule (but not in every case), neo-cons started somewhere on the left, and have moved right.
"Neoconservatism--the term was Michael Harrington's--originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ('Scoop') Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals.' While there was a pro-Israel wing, the movement's focus was on confrontation with the Soviet bloc abroad and on the defense of New Deal liberalism and color-blind liberal integrationism against rivals on the left at home. With the end of the cold war and the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Council, many 'paleoliberals' drifted back to the Democratic center. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once spoken of as a possible neoconservative presidential candidate, broke with the movement in the 1980s over its growing contempt for international law and its exaggeration of the Soviet threat. Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition."
In short, neo-cons were liberals who, at least in their own eyes, remained liberal and anti-Communist while their fellow Democrats moved somewhere to the left. Then, when the Democratic centre shifted back closer to the real centre, paleoliberals became outspoken Democrats again, but neo-cons didn't.
The view was that far too many people who should have known better were far too much like Chamberlain in 1939. It was up to the neo-cons to be like Churchill: vigilant, willing if not eager to go to war, and inclined to stress the strength and bad motives of powerful enemies, even at the risk of repeating exaggerations. The U.S. experience in Vietnam was unacceptable primarily, if not solely, because it ended in defeat. Otherwise it was, in Reagan's memorable words, "a noble cause."
The end of the Cold War revealed, among other things, how weak the major Communist states had been, and how far off official CIA and other estimates had been (and how even farther off the neo-con "Plan B" estimates had been). It might have revealed that democracy might come about more or less spontaneously within countries that had not known it before. The U.S. deserves full credit for maintaining the Truman Doctrine for decades, not conceding any territory easily, and setting an example of avoiding radical politics of the left or the right. The actual end of Communism in many countries, however, came not from American intervention, certainly not from invasion and occupation, but from something more like national self-determination.
One senses that the neo-cons were disappointed at this outcome. In a way they were hoping there was a dragon to slay, and they would get to slay it (or send a lot of noble youths to do so). They wanted to be not only leaders, but heroes. I venture to say: they were a bit sick of hearing about the greatest generation, and they wondered why they couldn't be the greatest instead.
"Neocon hostility to the UN, too often explained solely in terms of UN condemnations of Israel, is a relic of the 1970s and '80s, when the General Assembly was dominated by an anti-American alliance of the Soviet bloc and Third World autocracies. The claim that we are waging 'World War IV'--made by Elliot Cohen, James Woolsey and Norman Podhoretz--is a reflex of superannuated cold warriors, as are parallels between militant Islam and secular totalitarianism and the attempt to inflate China or post-Communist Russia into threats comparable to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany."
Some of the most tantalizing passages here for me concern the argument that middle-class morality, including a kind of ritual if not heart-felt churchgoing, was part of the strength of the British Empire at its peak, and needs to be reproduced in the U.S. if it is to achieve its own greatness. One of my favourite jokes about the neo-cons, which may go back to Anne Roche Muggeridge, is something like this: "Somebody had better start going to church, and soon. But it's not going to be me." Some would say that's the Leo Strauss influence on the neo-cons: pious morality is for the weak many, not for the strong few.
The extent of the neo-cons' original contribution to domestic policy is to say that the decadence of the socially liberal elites is at least as much of a threat as the cynicism and defeatism of the realists and isolationists.
Much of the work on Victorian morality and virtue had been done by Gertrude Himmelfarb. I can't help wondering if another influence on the neo-cons, perhaps by way of Leo Strauss, is Tocqueville. When I heard Mansfield recently, some of the discussion repeated Tocqueville's suggestions that Americans are likely to be pedestrian, their noses to the grindstone, with very little truly lofty aspiration or achievement. No Pascal, and no Descartes.
Here's Lind: "The idea that the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois 'new class' was developed by thinkers in the Trotskyist tradition like James Burnham and Max Schachtman, who influenced an older generation of neocons." Tocqueville said modern democrats, living in peace, are likely to be isolated from each other, and obsessed with small differences in material well-being. They will be drawn to religion, but it is likely to be of a transparently nutty kind.
I can't help thinking the view lurking among the neo-cons is that a good war--perhaps a never-ending war--will toughen us up, and instill some virtue in us. Granted, there will be casualties, but especially now that there is only one mega-power, there may be very little lasting cost, in military or economic terms, to invading one country after another.
9/11 made it seem to some that Americans should think and feel exactly like Israelis: constantly subject to violent, random, murderous attacks from a weak but elusive enemy. "They" hate us; there is no point in negotiating with "them"; if we humanize them, as Glenn Reynolds' wife (Dr. Helen Smith) has written, that may soften and weaken us, so let's not do that. I can't help thinking even the Lord of the Rings plays into this thinking. Here are some beings who seem vaguely human. But no, they're not! They're monsters! Let's be sure to hate them and kill them!
And the intellectuals may be thinking to themselves: well, it's not strictly true that they deserve to be hated, and the war will make them suffer, but it is almost certain to be good for the moral fibre of our people.
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