NeoConservatism

An Obituary for an Idea

C. Bradley Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594518317
• eBook ISBN: 9781317255628
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An obituary so soon! Surely the reports of neoconservatism's death are greatly exaggerated. C. Bradley Thompson has written (with Yaron Brook) the most comprehensive and original analysis of neoconservatism yet published and in the process has dealt it a mortal blow. Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea reveals publicly for the first time what the neocons call their philosophy of governance--their plan for governing America. This book explicates the deepest philosophic principles of neoconservatism, traces the intellectual relationship between the political philosopher Leo Strauss and contemporary neoconservative political actors, and provides a trenchant critique of neoconservatism from the perspective of America's founding principles. The theme of this timely book--neoconservatism as a species of anti-Americanism--will shake up the intellectual salons of both the Left and Right. What makes this book so compelling is that Thompson actually lived for many years in the Straussian/neoconservative intellectual world. Neoconservatism therefore fits into the "breaking ranks" tradition of scholarly criticism and breaks the mold when it comes to informed, incisive, nonpartisan critique of neoconservative thought and action.

PART I

THE END OF IDEOLOGY

CHAPTER 1

THE PATH TO POWER

During the 1990s and certainly in the years immediately after September 11, 2001, a spectre (to paraphrase Karl Marx) seemed to haunt America’s intellectual and political landscape—the spectre of neoconservatism. All the powers of America’s intellectual establishment entered into an unholy alliance to expose and exorcise this ominous threat: the liberal New York Times and The American Conservative magazine, the New Left and the Old Right, and Sidney Blumenthal and Pat Buchanan all sounded the alarm. The Left characterized the neoconservatives as crusading moralists and neo-fascists, and the Right denounced them as moral nihilists and neo-Jacobins.¹ Wherein lies the truth?

Unfortunately, despite the many books and articles that have been published on the neocons in recent years, the deeper meaning of neoconservatism is still largely unknown. Much of the current popular literature on the neocons is unpersuasively hostile, overwrought, superficial, paranoid, and wrongheaded. The neocons have been treated by both their Left- and Right-wing enemies in the press as though they were some sort of malevolent, Oz-like force secretly controlling and pulling the strings during the eight years of the Bush administration. More invidiously, some of the neocons’ most hostile critics have suggested that the “neo” in neocon stands simply for “Jewish defender of Israeli interests.” During the lead up to and following the second Iraq war, the New York Times and the trendy establishment magazines and newspapers around the world ran articles on the neocon “cabal” (usually a code word for “Jewish”) and its quest for world domination. The French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur ran a six-page spread (under the headline banner “After Iraq, the World”) on “les intellectuels néoconservateurs” and their imperialistic designs for world domination. The British, never to be outdone by the French, ran an hour-long special on their offical government television station that began with the ominous words: “This is a story about people who want the world run their way, the American way.”² Some news outlets even ran articles—replete with fowcharts—connecting all the conspirators, including to whom they were married and where and with whom they went to college. In the end, such articles often said more about those who wrote them than about their subjects.

Conspiracy theories were rife during this period. It all sounded very sinister, and the neocons were made to appear as though they were America’s modern political Hydra, becoming more powerful with each attempt to weaken them. Amusingly, it turns out that much of the paranoid misinformation about the neocons came from Lyndon LaRouche, that perennially self-parodying kook of American politics. Surprisingly (or not), the press took what LaRouche fed them hook, line, and sinker. How ironic that the New York Times and much of the elite media had become a mouthpiece for LaRouche’s army.³

Just as there has been a great deal of mendacious rubbish published about the neoconservatives in recent years, so the neocons in turn have written a string of self-pitying and self-justifying essays in their own defense. If the neoconservatives are to be believed, virtually none of their critics have properly understood or explained what neoconservatism is all about. As the neoconservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it: “If you ever read a sentence that starts with ‘Neocons believe,’ there is a 99.4 percent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.”⁴ In 2004, leading neoconservatives published a collection of twenty-four essays, the purpose of which was to defend the realm from the naysayers and nattering nabobs of the establishment media. They treated their critics rather dismissively as “full mooners” and crackpots. Worse yet, some neoconservatives, such as David Brooks and Joshua Muravchik, have simply evaded serious intellectual engagement with their critics by dismissing them as anti-Semitic.⁵

The whole debate over neoconservatism has become rather unseemly. It is tinged with bitter partisanship that can only foster a high degree of intellectual evasion and dishonesty. We now live in a very strange intellectual world, where neocon means Jewish and where a critic of neoconservatism means anti-Semite. The nasty critics and the fawning sycophants alike have, for very different reasons, dimmed the lights on neoconservatism and prevented the general public from seeing the deepest levels of neoconservative thought and practice. More to the point, virtually all of the polemical studies of neoconservatism, both for and against, are characterized by a high degree of superficiality.

The critics of the neocons, for instance, tend to focus on personalities, organizations, and dark conspiracies. They operate at a rather gossipy level by identifying who studied with whom, who married and sired whom, and how they are connected through a labyrinthine network of universities, think tanks, magazines, foundations, and midlevel offices at the Pentagon. Likewise, the neocons and their supporters have purposely promoted a superficial and distorted view of their own movement by advancing the perception that neoconservatism is so ideologically and politically diverse and that it has changed so much over time that there is actually “no ‘there’ there.” They resist any attempt to label—i.e., to identify or define—their views. Writing in Commentary, one of the neocons’ house organs, James Nuechterlein, has said that “Neoconserva-tism is a movement that, as far as most of its adherents are concerned, would rather not speak its name.”⁶ In fact, several high-profile “neocons” have even denied that they are neocons, or at minimum they reject the label. At the very least, the neocons want you, the public, to believe that neoconservatism is something of an ideological and political mirage. They often hide behind a stylistic veil of writing that emphasizes ambiguity, paradox, and irony. Their style of public communication often appears as a carefully calculated web of equivocations, hints, approximations, and generalties that lead the reader in a certain direction without ever quite establishing objectively defined principles. Thus the neocons are specialists in the art of plausible deniability, which leaves them with an automatic escape hatch that renders them immune to meaningful analysis and criticism. Simply put, it is impossible to criticize what one can never quite see or know.

Let us, then, begin anew. Of this much we can be certain: Modern America’s intellectual and political skyline has been shaped rather profoundly by neoconservative thinkers. As Norman Podhoretz, a leading neoconservative patriarch, has written rather modestly, “Neoconservatism has had a trickle-down effect on the political culture, and its influence on both major parties is evident even today.”⁷ For better or worse, the world in which we live bears the imprint of neoconservative thinking. Thus it is critically important that we know exactly what they stand for and where they are heading. Only then, as Abraham Lincoln once said in a different context, can we “better judge what to do, and how to do it.”⁸ What is therefore most needed today is a fresh study of neoconservatism that is both intelligently critical and cautiously respectful.

A Very Brief History of Neoconservatism

Who exactly are the neoconservatives, where did they come from, and what do they stand for? The history of the neocons is well known and need not be repeated here at great length. Their story is told in the wonderfully entertaining PBS documentary Arguing the World (2001), and several monographs have recounted the origins and developments of neoconservatism.⁹ Legend has it that neoconservatism was born at Brooklyn College during the late 1930s. The first meeting of the men who would eventually become the founders of the neoconservative movement—men such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Nathan Glazer—took place at Alcove One in the college lunchroom, which was the home of the college Trotskyists, and was notably distinguished from Alcove Two, home of the college Stalinists. The young men who would one day become advisers to Democratic and Republican presidents alike cut their first ideological teeth on the heated sectarian debates that defined the American Marxist movement during the later years of the Great Depression.¹⁰

Thus, although Neoconservatism was born and nurtured on the radical Left, its history is of a slow rightward drift over the course of thirty or forty years. The men and women who would one day become neoconservatives broke ranks first with Marxian socialism in the 1940s and ’50s because of its totalitarianism, with liberalism during the 1960s because of its appeasement of the Soviet Union, and finally with the New Left during the 1970s because of its imperialistic nihilism. Thus over the course of forty years, they evolved rather seamlessly from neo-Marxists to neoliberals to neoconservatives.

During most of the 1960s, these soon-to-be neocons saw themselves as unsentimental, pragmatic liberals—as New Deal–Fair Deal–New Frontier–Great Society democrats in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey. Nathan Glazer, one of the first-generation neocons and coeditor with Irving Kristol of their fagship journal, The Public Interest, has described the political inclinations of these proto-neocons in these terms:

All of us had voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and I would hazard that most of the original stalwarts of The Public Interest, editors and regular contributors, continued to vote for Democratic presidential candidates all the way to the present. Recall that the original definition of the neoconservatives was that they fully embraced the reforms of the New Deal, and indeed the major programs of Johnson’s Great Society… . Had we not defended the major social programs, from Social Security to Medicare, there would have been no need for the ‘neo’ before conservatism.

The catalyst that pushed them into the conservative movement was the moral, cultural, and political implosion of liberalism during the late 1960s. The neocons saw an America that was being destroyed politically by liberalism’s failed social policies and culturally by the moral chaos created by the New Left. The soon-to-be neoconservatives were appalled by the inability of liberal intellectuals to see the obvious failures of their Great Society programs and by their appeasement of student radicals on America’s besieged college campuses. Unable to defend itself from the onslaught of the counterculture and the New Left, liberalism was therefore also unable to defend America—indeed, civilization itself—from the new barbarism. And so these disaffected and skeptical liberals broke very openly and publicly with liberalism. By the late 1960s, Irving Kristol’s transformation was complete:

I no longer had to pretend to believe—what in my heart I could no longer believe—that liberals were wrong because they subscribe to this or that erroneous opinion on this or that topic. No—liberals were wrong, liberals are wrong, because they are liberals. What is wrong with liberalism is liberalism—a metaphysics and a mythology that is woefully blind to human and political reality.¹¹

At the same time that neoconservatives announced their disaffection from post-1960s liberalism, they also began a steady migration into the conservative intellectual movement and the Republican Party. In 1971 the editors at the National Review invited the neocons to “C’mon In, the Water’s Fine,” and to join their mainstream conservative movement.¹² Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Kristol was followed into the Republican Party and into the conservative movement by many of his liberal friends and colleagues (although not all and not all at once). And in the near three decades since Ronald Reagan’s first term in the White House, the neocons have systematically taken over the conservative intellectual movement with remarkable speed, their ideas have come to dominate the Republican Party, and their policies have influenced the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Scores of neocons have held high-level positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations of both father and son. Richard Perle, for instance, a leading neoconservative foreign-policy expert, has stated approvingly that President George W. Bush, “on issue after issue, has reflected the thinking of neoconservatives.” The New York Review of Books ran an article in 2003 during the pinnacle of neocon influence under the ominous title “The Neocons in Power.” And during the 2004 Democratic presidential primary, Howard Dean charged that “President Bush has been captured by the neoconservatives around him.”¹³

The neocons’ political influence is largely a result of their impressive intellectual accomplishments. They are, without question, the most intellectually sophisticated and ambitious faction of the postwar intellectual Right. They were accepted into the conservative intellectual movement during the 1970s and ’80s largely because they came with a high degree of intellectual caché. They had the right stuff: academic standing and connections with the elite liberal culture. The neocons brought to the Right a kind of intellectual savoir faire and political savvy that it had lacked for several generations.

The neoconservatives teach at the best universities, including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. They control the wealthiest conservative philanthropic foundations, such as the John M. Olin (recently defunct) and Bradley foundations; they manage the leading conservative think tanks, such as the American Enterprise and Hudson institutes; they run the leading conservative journals and magazines, such as Commentary, The Public Interest (recently defunct), National Interest, The Weekly Standard, City Journal, The New Criterion, and National Affairs; they have a presence in the major media, including at least one columnist at the New York Times and a strong presence at Fox News.

The neocons are also remarkably prolific. Over the course of the last sixty years, they have written what probably amounts to hundreds of books and articles on a remarkably wide range of topics, such as communism, capitalism, democracy, student radicalism, poverty, affirmative action, Central America, dictatorship, deviance, religion, the U.N., feminism, abortion, homosexual marriage, progressive education, judicial activism, pornography, modern art, and other subjects too many to list. Their books sometimes even sit atop the bestseller lists. The neocons write with a philosophical dexterity, a moral seriousness, and a literary verve and clarity that is rare in the academy. Their prose style is almost always high-minded, elegant, probing, earnest, witty, commanding, ironic, and often combative. The substance and literary style of an Irving Kristol essay is, for instance, reminiscent of the writing produced by the great nineteenth-century belles-lettres essayists Matthew Arnold, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill. A neoconservative essay or book typically draws on a remarkably wide range of ideas taken from specialized studies in political science, psychology, economics, and sociology, wrapped in images and metaphors borrowed from history, philosophy, and literature. A typical neoconservative essay by Daniel Bell or a New York Times op-ed by David Brooks might quote, for instance, an economic report from the Rand Corporation in one paragraph and then explain its meaning in the next with references to Aristotle, Rousseau, or Nietzsche. They also have an amazing ability to mask their normative claims in the descriptive and predictive language of the social sciences, which is one reason why the neocons can sometimes seem so slippery and impervious to criticism.

When they are in attack mode against their political enemies (e.g., the New Left, liberal appeasers, paleoconservatives...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Intruduction The Neoconservative Persuasion
• Part I The End of Ideology
• Part II The Crisis of Modernity
• Part III The Return to Plato
• Part IV A New World Order
• Part V Soft Despotism
• Conclusion In the American Grain
• Notes
• Index
• Notes