Monsters to Destroy

The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin

Ira Chernus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317255956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

"This book takes an incisive look at the stories we are told -- and tell ourselves -- about evil forces and American responses. Chernus pushes beyond political rhetoric and media cliches to examine psychological mechanisms that freeze our concepts of the world." Norman Solomon, author, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death In his new book Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, Ira Chernus tackles the question of why U.S. foreign policy, aimed at building national security, has the paradoxical effect of making the country less safe and secure. His answer: The "war on terror" is based not on realistic appraisals of the causes of conflict, but rather on "stories" that neoconservative policymakers tell about human nature and a world divided between absolute good and absolute evil. The root of the stories is these policymakers' terror of the social and cultural changes that swept through U.S. society in the 1960s. George W. Bush and the neoconservatives cast the agents of change not simply as political opponents, but as enemies or sinners acting with evil intent to destroy U.S. values and morals-that is, as "monsters" rather than human beings. The war on terror transfers that plot from a domestic to a foreign stage, making it more appealing even to those who reject the neoconservative agenda at home. Because it does not deal with the real causes of global conflict, it harms rather than helps the goal of greater national security.

PART I

Conservative Moralist Stories

1

Neoconservative Stories

The ’60s and the Cold War

On September 11, 2001, as Americans watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center fall to the ground, it seemed that nothing in American life would ever be the same again. Now, looking back in the rear-view mirror of history, it appears that some things have changed dramatically. But some things have stayed pretty much the same.

One great change is the rise of the neoconservatives. Before 9/11, neocons already held most of the policymaking posts in the George W. Bush administration. That day’s tragedy gave them the political strength to dominate U.S. foreign policy for the first time. But Bush’s neocon advisors did not change their views or develop a new approach to the world in the wake of the unexpected attack. They saw no need for that. They already had a full range of policies, and a complex set of stories to explain those policies, set to go. They had been telling their stories for years, waiting for a chance to implement their policies. Nothing had changed for them but the political climate, which finally gave them a chance to act.

Since their stories blended so well with Bush’s more traditional conservative stories, the president could become their most effective spokesman and storyteller. The two conservatisms, the old and the “neo,” were fused by the horrific events of September 11. Together, they gave birth to the war on terrorism and to the insecurity it breeds. The deepest roots of that insecurity are to be found not in the events of 9/11 but in the conservative and neoconservative stories, which were kindled to a newly powerful life by the flames of 9/11.

When Americans said that after 9/11 nothing would be the same again, they were often expressing a new and overwhelming sense of insecurity. Now, it seemed, for the first time, daily life would be lived under the shadow of a terrifying threat. For the neoconservatives, this too was only more of the same. Their story about America told them that the nation had long faced a terrifying threat that imperiled its way of life. It had come, in part, from abroad—until 1991, from the Kremlin, the headquarters of global communism. In 2001, they could hold on to their familiar story about a foreign threat, simply substituting terrorist for communist.

But the neocon story traced the deepest roots of threat much closer to home, in the cultural transformations that rocked U.S. society in the 1960s. In their version of history, the pernicious influence of the ’60s was still eroding the moral fabric of American life. In response to 9/11, they simply took their story about radical threats against traditional values at home and projected it onto a global scale, treating enemies foreign and domestic as two different heads of the same monster. That twin-headed monster still posed a dire peril in the twenty-first century, neocons warned. The insecurity that had haunted American life since the ’60s continued unabated. That had not changed at all.

What did change on September 11 was the influence that this neoconservative story could wield. With only minor changes, it became a story about a war against terrorism, a war with no end in sight. The insecurity that neocons had taken for granted since the ’60s would now be shared by the vast majority of the American people. To understand America’s national insecurity and its war on terrorism, which can never relieve the insecurity but only heighten it, the first step is to understand the neoconservative story.

WHAT IS A NEOCONSERVATIVE?

No one can say for sure just what a neoconservative is, not even the neocons themselves. Irving Kristol, widely acknowledged as the pioneer, leader, and “godfather” of the movement, once wrote that it’s not a movement in the conventional political sense. Neoconservatism “holds no meetings, has no organizational form, has no specific programmatic goals, and when two neoconservatives meet they are more likely to argue with one another than to confer or conspire.”¹ So their story has many different versions. Yet there is some common ground. There are some threads that tie together all their stories and mark them as distinctively neoconservative.

Gary Dorrien, a leading scholar of the movement, has defined it as “an intellectual movement originated by former leftists” that promotes “a return to traditional cultural values,” such as patriotism, individualism, free market capitalism, heterosexuality, monogamy, deferred gratification, and deference to the authority of males, elders, teachers, rulers, and Western culture. Specifically, Dorrien finds the following values at the top of the neocon agenda:

• the rule of traditional elites

• condemnation of feminism, affirmative action, multiculturalism

• gratitude to America

• militant anticommunism

• the superiority of capitalism and capitalist modernization

• a minimal welfare state²

After the cold war ended, Dorrien dropped “militant anticommunism” from his list, since it was no longer relevant. In their careful study of the movement, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke claim that the end of the cold war spawned a brand new kind of neoconservatism, “an entirely new political animal,”³ with no real connection to the neocons of earlier decades.

This view goes too far. In fact, when Halper and Clarke list the central concerns of the post–cold war movement, they name features that marked the movement long before the 1990s:

• support of democratic allies

• challenging of evildoers who defy American values

• America’s total responsibility for global order

• promotion of political and economic freedom everywhere

• increased spending on defense⁴

In another list, the same authors identify more neocon fundamentals that are quite distinct from the main post–cold war themes:

• stressing the need to choose constantly between good and evil

• making a willingness to confront evil the test of political character

• analyzing international issues in absolute, black-and-white moral categories

• assuming that relations between states depend on military power⁵

These themes, along with the ones on Dorrien’s list, have always been important features of neoconservatism. So has another point that Halper and Clarke note: Neocons “show little or no interest in the economic implications of their policies.” (Michael Lind, a former editor of Irving Kristol’s journal The National Interest, agrees that their policies do “not reflect business interests in any direct way.… Explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken.”) All these common themes suggest that there is an enduring unity in the movement from its inception to the present day.⁶

However, the early neocons did not focus primarily on the international arena. In fact, they did not focus at all on specific political policies, foreign or domestic. Rather, they were most concerned—and the movement has remained vitally concerned—about the one area that is common to all these lists of essentials: demonstrating moral strength by combating evil, in order to preserve traditional values. This is the central thread that has run through the neoconservative weave from beginning to end, from their war against radicalism in the 1960s to their war against terrorism today.

THE THREAT OF THE 1960S COUNTERCULTURE

The best way to understand the neoconservative stories is to begin at the beginning. Neoconservatism is new and different from old-fashioned conservatism because it began with a group of left-wing radicals who rejected their left-leaning views in the 1960s and turned to the political right. They rallied to the defense of traditional values because they saw those values under an attack more fierce than any they had ever imagined. “If there is any one thing that neoconservatives are unanimous about, it is their dislike of the counterculture,” Irving Kristol once wrote. Another guiding light of the early movement, Norman Podhoretz, agreed: “Revulsion against the counterculture accounted for more converts to neoconservativism than any other single factor. This revulsion was not only directed against the counterculture itself; it was also inspired by the abject failure of the great institutions of the liberal community to resist the counterculture.”⁷

Most of the early neocons had spent the 1950s and early ’60s as ardent cold war liberals, supporting the Democratic Party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. The Vietnam war era presented them with a great crisis. Young people chanted, “Make love, not war.” The Democratic Party, influenced by the peace movement and the counterculture, turned so far to the left that these moderate liberals no longer recognized it. They found themselves in a society that they could not make sense of. “It was the fundamental assumptions of contemporary liberalism,” Kristol confesses, “that were my enemy.”⁸ Since the neocons were generally writers and intellectuals, they instinctively turned to words to make sense out of the confusion. In lectures and essays, they articulated their beliefs about what was going wrong in America and what could set it right. They promoted a new story, trying their best to reshape reality to match their own ideas.

According to the neocon story, the United States was transformed by the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and it has never again been the same. People stopped living by traditional values. Society gave license to forces that had previously been tightly constrained: women, racial and ethnic minorities, socialists, pacifists. Above all, the forces of desire were released, both in drug-enhanced imagination and in physical bodies. Indeed, “everything is now permitted,” Kristol complained. “The inference is that one has a right to satisfy one’s appetites without delay.” To Podhoretz, this rush of desire reflected an underlying refusal to grow up and accept the responsibilities of becoming a mature self. It must have come from a very deep “self-hatred and self-contempt.”⁹

The neocon story, beginning with this alarming view of social change, jumped quickly from change to threat. The counterculture was based on the idea that “the individual must be free to create his own morality,” Kristol claimed. Under the reign of this “self-centered hedonism,” the United States lost its sense of moral purpose and its authentic religious values. Society’s institutions were “inexorably drained of their legitimacy.” The counterculture “constructed a supermarket of possible good and decent lives. This is a prescription for moral anarchy, which is exactly what we are now experiencing.… The idea of ordered liberty could collapse.”¹⁰

Indeed, Kristol charged, the new radicalism pushed individual liberty beyond anarchy to nihilism.¹¹ It permitted everything and believed in nothing. All the traditional boundaries—between right and wrong, virtue and sin, male and female, possible and impossible—were blurred or even erased. Every traditional institution came under attack: the government, the churches and synagogues, even the heterosexual family. Podhoretz went so far as to accuse liberals of a “sluttish antinomianism”—a rejection of all rules—because they believed that great powers could no longer impose their will on other nations, which meant that “nobody was in charge” of the world. In practical terms, this fostered a multiculturalism that was nothing but “a vulgar plot to undermine Western civilization itself.” “The infection grew and spread,” he lamented, “until it reached the proportions of an epidemic … a spiritual plague.”¹²

According to neocon sociologist Nathan Glazer, radicals believed that “members of the middle class do not deserve to hold on to their property, their positions, or even their lives.” The counterculture aimed to destroy them all, Kristol claimed, leaving only “freedom, confusion, and disorientation, all embellished with a veneer of ‘equality.’”¹³

The neoconservatives have continued to voice the same complaints against the radicals. Brigitte and Peter Berger, sympathetic scholarly observers of the movement, put it bluntly: Neoconservatives oppose “the sudden descent of the elite culture and political liberalism into an orgy of utopian lunacies.… The lunacies have become organized into a cultural and political establishment.” The left-leaning establishment will not nurture the inner strength needed for self-control, the argument goes. Since leftists respect no boundaries, they see no reason to take strong stands on anything; it’s all relative, they say. They no longer even care about winning the contests of life. In fact, they revel in their weakness, which is why they idealize the feminine. Neocons are especially sensitive to gender issues; Podhoretz complains that “the plague … rages as fiercely as ever … among the kind of women who do not wish to be women and among those men who do not wish to be men.”¹⁴

The countercultural attack on traditional boundaries and competition is an attack on capitalism, too, Kristol contends: “If you delegitimate the bourgeois society, the market economy—almost incidentally—is also deligitimated.” The leftists would take away our liberty to compete and be big winners (or losers) in the marketplace. Indeed, they would put a stop to the economic contest altogether, for the sake of trying to make everyone equal. They want to believe that life need not be a contest, that no hard choices need to be made because everyone can have everything. Midge Decter, a rare feminine voice among neocon writers, says bluntly that leftwing feminists simply want “freedom from all difficulty.”¹⁵

In all these attacks, the neoconservatives are inventing, and then rejecting, an exaggerated and distorted version of the ’60s that comes from their fertile, frightened imaginations. Their critique reveals a lot about how and why the movement got started. But it reveals very little about the countercultural radicalism of the 1960s. Step outside the neocon story and things look much less menacing. The counterculture is not nihilistic. There is no vacuum of meaning in it. On the contrary, it attracted so many young people in the ’60s—and cont...