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Home Front: Politix

5 Myths About Those Nefarious Neocons

2008-02-11

By Jacob Heilbrunn
As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan.

I can stomache criticism from Buckley, but Buchanan's a Paleoconservative whose vanity was more important to him than the Republican Party. I hope he and the other 17 members of the Reform Party are having a good time and that they'll stay out of Republican business, thankyew.

So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the misconceptions grow.

The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right. This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really liberals. The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament. Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia.

After World War II convinced them that the United States wasn't an imperialist power but one fighting for freedom, Kristol and his fellow travelers briefly embraced liberalism in the late 1940s. But as the convulsions of the 1960s reenergized the radical left, the future neocons kept moving right. All along, they retained the penchant for abusive invective and zest for combat that they had first honed as Trotskyists, wielding magazine articles and op-eds as weapons to discredit their foes and champion their ideas.

Posted by:Fred

#9 And Neocons are JOOOOOOS!

(thats a common shorthand for it on the left)

Posted by: OldSpook 2008-02-11 16:45

#8 but I here you on the active military.

Im thinking the next hawkish Dem (after the Obama admin messes up, Im sorry to say) will be a Veteran, AND a hispanic. ;)

Posted by: liberalhawk 2008-02-11 15:48

#7 Not so much me of course, or even Sen Leiberman. More the rival pundits - Beinart, Berman, Hitchens, and a bunch of others - the people who would contest Zbiggy et al for control of for policy in an Obama admin.

Posted by: liberalhawk 2008-02-11 15:46

#6 You and Senator Joe Lieberman, liberalhawk. But last I heard, 25% of the active military are Democrats, and soon enough they'll regain control of the reconstituted Democratic Party -- I'd say within half a generation. In the meantime, the liberal hawks are going to be stuck voting for Republicans, because if we don't win the war it won't matter if education is improved in the inner city.

/this prediction worth exactly what you just paid for it, I'm afraid.

Posted by: trailing wife 2008-02-11 14:49

#5 "Meanwhile, the CIA (which the neocons loathe) has outflanked them on Iran by declaring that it isn't building nuclear weapons."

Personally I think the CIA has only made itself look foolish (again) by the Iran NIE. Even the French dont take it seriously.

"And one of the most prominent surviving neocons, the NSC's Abrams, has proved unable to stop Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians"

Well again this gets to "whos a neocon" Robert Kagan at least, has not opposed the renewed peace process, AFAIK. And of course the liberal hawks (now best represented by the WaPo editorial page, TNR having been turned into yet another 'realist' haven) havent. There is of course a difference between disagreeing with specific moves by Condi and opposing the peace process.

Posted by: liberalhawk 2008-02-11 14:42

#4 "In fact, the neocons' worldview melds both of the major strands of traditional U.S. foreign policy thinking -- realism and idealism -- in a highly opportunistic fashion. This is why liberal hawks such as author Paul Berman, Washington Post columnist Peter Beinart and the editors of the New Republic signed on to the neocon crusade at the outset of the Iraq war, while the true realists, such as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, blanched in horror. "

You guys is missing the point. This isnt aimed at you. Its aimed at guys like me, its part of the not quite ended struggle for the soul of the dem party and the center left more broadly. A struggle that LOOKS over, but Heilbrunn is too smart to let a badly wounded enemy get away. Its a repitition of crucial meme for the Kossacks, neo-realists, et al - the liberal hawks wuz fooled by the neocons, dont EVER listen to them ever again on ANYTHING. Not on Iran, not on Israel, not on China or Russia, not on democracy promotion anywhere, not on WOT tactics, not on ANYTHING.

Posted by: liberalhawk 2008-02-11 14:38

#3 Heilbrunn is being disingenuous in the extreme here.

Notice he fails utterly to mention Leo Strauss, whose works on the JudeoChristian and Western tradition of individual liberty and the threat to it, especially his small book On Tyranny, were deeply influential among what became the neoconservative movement.

I only had the privilege of meeting Strauss once. He came to visit an old friend and colleague Jacob Klein and to speak to the students at my small undergraduate college. A man of deep learning, great thoughtfulness and clear vision about the need to oppose tyranny wherever it sought to steam roller over the consciences and liberty of men and women.

Strauss and those whom he provoked to thought and action had no time for the far left any more than for the far right -- and he had personal experience of both.

Posted by: lotp 2008-02-11 06:30

#2 From a book review of Heilbrunn's book at Amazon.com
The neocons have become at once the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. Critics on left and right describe them as a tight-knit cabal that ensnared the Bush administration in an unwinnable foreign war.

Who are the neoconservatives? How did an obscure band of policy intellectuals, left for dead in the 1990s, suddenly rise to influence the Bush administration and revolutionize American foreign policy?

Jacob Heilbrunn wittily and pungently depicts the government officials, pundits, and think-tank denizens who make up this controversial movement, bringing them to life against a background rich in historical detail and political insight. Setting the movement in the larger context of the decades-long battle between liberals and conservatives, first over communism, now over the war on terrorism, he shows that they have always been intellectual mavericks, with a fiery prophetic temperament (and a rhetoric to match) that sets them apart from both liberals and traditional conservatives.

Neoconservatism grew out of a split in the 1930s between Stalinists and followers of Trotsky. These obscure ideological battles between warring Marxist factions were transported to the larger canvas of the Cold War, as over time the neocons moved steadily to the right, abandoning the Democratic party after 1972 when it shunned intervention abroad, and completing their journey in 1980 when they embraced Ronald Reagan and the Republican party. There they supplied the ideological glue that held the Reagan coalition together, combining the agenda of family values with a crusading foreign policy.

Out of favor with the first President Bush, and reduced to gadflies in the Clinton years, they suddenly found themselves in George W. Bushs administration in a position of unprecendented influence. For the first time in their long history, they had their hands on the levers of power. Prompted by 9/11, they used that power to advance what they believed to be Americas strategic interest in spreading democracy throughout the Arab world.

So in other words, he's trying to sell his book, which is on sale at Amazon for 50% off.

I might have considered myself a neocon, but I ain't no relation to Stalin or Trotsky.

Posted by: Bobby 2008-02-11 06:23

#1 Churchill sais that if at twenty you weren't from the left you had no heart and oif at thirty you hadn't turned right you had no brains.

Well a neocon is someone who got a brian and has not lost his heart while so doing. That is why the left hates them so much because they threaten to deprive the left from its base and so doing from their power and much lucrative positions.

Posted by: JFM 2008-02-11 04:55

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