What is needed is a good dose of the neoconservatism of old.
By Jonah Goldberg
In the play Embedded, Tim Robbins’s 2003 satire about the Iraq invasion, a thinly veiled Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz shout with Nazi-like gusto, “Hail, Leo Strauss!” and get sexually aroused at the prospect of international conquest. During the post-9/11 age of neo-phobia, when an irrational fear of anything that might be called “neoconservative” gripped the nation, such critiques passed as intelligently nuanced.
Ed. Comment: I think they call referring to Tim Robbins in any serious discussion of ideas a “straw man.” For conservatives (whether politically or socially so defined), scorn from Hollywood is, umm, nothing new. Moving on from that, I’m not quite sure what Jonah Goldberg means about an age of neo-phobia following 9/11. Would that be the time when the United States Government more or less implemented the A Clean Break plan? Neo-phobia indeed. Would that be the time when Paul Wolfowitz as Deputy Secretary of Defense was a prime driving force behind US policy, hailed as an Acheson for our age? Yeah, I thought so. More like hydrophobia . . . .
Neocons have been attacked as secret Trotskyites, open imperialists and perfidious double agents for Israel. Some think the neocons are something like Jesuits (or perhaps Jewsuits) in the service of their dark anti-pope Strauss, a long-dead, German-Jewish political philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. to escape Hitler.
Why attack them as secret Trotskyites, when they come right out and admit it? (I like Schwarz’s line, by the by, “But they did not apologize, did not grovel, did not crawl and beg forgiveness for having, at one time, been stirred by the figure of Trotsky.” After all, who among us has not been stirred? Well, James Bond, I suppose. Shaken, not stirred. Personally, I’d have picked a different long-dead, German-Jewish political philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. to escape Hitler, but hey, that’s me. And yes, Mises was Austrian. I know.
In a hopeful sign that it’s once again safe to discuss the topic sanely, Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment offers a renewed defense of neoconservative foreign policy in the latest issue of World Affairs Journal.
“The first thing that could be said about this neoconservative worldview is that there is nothing very conservative about it,” Kagan writes. “But a more important question is, how ‘neo’ is it?” His answer: not very.
Cat. Bag. Out. Here we to have one of the (many) Kagans asserting that neo-conservatism shares definitional attributes with the Holy Roman Empire, being “not what it’s called.” Neither, that is, new, nor conservative.
From our earliest days, Americans have supported the promotion of democracy around the world, often by force and without undue heed to international institutions. William Henry Seward, a founder of the Republican Party and Lincoln’s secretary of state, argued that it was America’s mission to lead the way “to the universal restoration of power to the governed.” A generation earlier, statesman Henry Clay championed the idea that America had the “duty to share with the rest of mankind this most precious gift” of liberty. Both world wars, Korea and Vietnam would be inconceivable without accounting for America’s dedication to the promotion and defense of democracy.
Anyone who honestly takes this seriously has been huffing paint. Seward famously said that “there is a higher power than the Constitution” which as sentiment is inarguable but for policy making is disaster. And on 1 April 1861, Seward proposed that he be given command of a war against, umm, Europe. Yeah, the guy who thinks the Constitution is a scrap of paper and a war against a continental civilization was a good idea. I can see how it fits the neoconservative outlook, but I don’t see how that’s a good thing.
And while Henry Clay may have talked up our duty to share the most precious gift of liberty, he was conservative enough to have been known as the Great Compromiser. You know, the “avert a civil war” compromise. As for the idea that World War One was fought to promote democracy, I’ll simply point out that we were allied with Great Britain, on whose empire the sun never set. Without bringing up India, or the vast swaths of Asia and Africa which were under the British heel, I will simply observe that our own national government had some disagreements with Britain on the subject of representative government.
Kagan traces such sentiments to the dawn of the republic. The Founders, he writes, saw the U.S. as a “‘Hercules in a cradle’ ... because its beliefs, which liberated human potential and made possible a transcendent greatness, would capture the imagination and the following of all humanity.”
George Washington, whose presence is reliably reported during some founding events, counselled that we should Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it 7 It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it ? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue ? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?
In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.
Sorry—that was long, but at least one President George knew English.
Even amid the 15-month riot of Bush-bashing that has been the Democratic party’s fratricidal primary, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama conceded the core neoconservative principle of the Bush doctrine. “There’s absolutely a connection between a democratic regime and heightened security for the United States,” Clinton said, responding to events in Pakistan. Obama would not only unilaterally attack al-Qaida in Pakistan without Pakistan’s permission if necessary, but he also argues that anti-Americanism in the Middle East is a direct consequence of the lack of democracy.
Boy howdy, kids. The Clintons did it first! I must have missed the memo saying that the Clintons had pursued sound and effective foreign policies. As to Barack Obama, well, gee. Barack Obama doesn’t know beans about international relations, lounging on the beach in Indonesia aside. THIS is an argument in support of the neoconservative principles? From the most liberal senator in the US Senate?
Obviously, supporting the spread of democracy hardly requires you to support the Iraq war. But it works the other way around as well. Support for the Iraq war doesn’t automatically make you a neoconservative. Douglas J. Feith, a former undersecretary of defense after 9/11, argues in his new memoir, War and Decision, that democratization didn’t rank very high among the Bush administration’s early priorities. Moreover, the administration’s mistakes in Iraq — perhaps including the war itself — have less relationship to ideology than many think. “It is possible,” as Kagan notes, “to be prudent or imprudent, capable or clumsy, wise or foolish, hurried or cautious in pursuit of any doctrine.” (Just ask newly hired Hamas spokesman Jimmy Carter.)
OK, so, umm maybe a Trotskyite desire to light a fire in the minds of men, and advance a permanent revolution? Or that whole A Clean Break thing again? I control-F’d it, and not a mention of democracy to be found! Goldberg also asserts that Bush is not an evil man, just incompetent. Notice, please, how Kagan links the terms, good/bad. Prudent/imprudent. Capable/clumsy. Wise/foolish. Hurried/cautious. Umm, what? HURRIED/CAUTIOUS? No time for reflection, kids, them mullahs is about to nuke Seattle!
America’s forcible promotion of democracy has been both successful (Germany, Japan) and unsuccessful (Vietnam). Where Iraq will fall in the win-loss columns is unknowable right now. But the idea that the “Iraq project” is some bizarre and otherworldly enterprise will seem laughable to historians a century from now, even if it is viewed as a disaster.
I largely agree with Kagan on all of these points. But I have a problem, too. Kagan embraces and celebrates the definition of neoconservatism as a doctrine of democracy promotion abroad, moralism in foreign policy and unilateralism toward these ends when necessary. But the original neoconservatism of the late ’60s and early ’70s wasn’t about any of these things.
It was about domestic affairs, primarily the dangers of overreach. Less an ideology than a branch of skepticism about the ability of government to achieve anything like utopian goals, neoconservatism was the school for former liberals who’d been “mugged by reality,” in Irving Kristol’s words.
I get giggly when Jonah Goldberg talks about the dangers of overreach. No, really. I do.
Kagan and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol (son of Irving) actually rejected the label “neoconservative” when describing their ideal foreign policy in a now-famous 1994 Foreign Affairs essay, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” Yet, since then, their neo-Reaganism has simply been called “neoconservatism.”
Hence the irony: The best cure for today’s neoconservatism is a big dose of the neoconservatism of old.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
(C) 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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