"Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower." (William Kristol, 2003.)
"The prospect of American military intervention and occupation to 'make democracy work' . . . something like an American empire with a purely ideological motive power . .. cannot be a serious option for American foreign policy." (Irving Kristol, 1991.)
This contradiction between two leading "neoconservatives," son and father, supports University of Michigan professor Alan Wald’s contention that, "Today the label appears as a catch-all phrase applied to diverse right-wing intellectuals, many with little palpable connection to the famous neoconservative movement that coalesced in the 1970s."
Accordingly I ask, does "neocon" have some definite meaning connected to the intellectual histories of actual people (and if so, what is it?), or are we simply employing a politcal swear-word, as past generations, for example, used "communist" and "fascist"?
My conclusion is that, at least as I most often see "neocon" used here, the word does not have any clear or precise meaning. Rather "neocon" is used as a catch-all word of political disparagement for right-wing views, or for views someone wants us to think of as right-wing.
The birth of neoconservatism
One story of the birth of neoconservatism begins on the center-left among a group of intellectuals who had soured on (what they considered) the utopianism of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the hubris of liberalism generally. In 1965, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell founded The Public Interest, in opposition, as Kristol put in the first issue, to "a prior commitment to ideology. . . . For it is the nature of ideology to preconceive reality."
But was Kristol still on the Left? The distinguished New York Intellectual and literary critic Alfred Kazin didn't think so. Writing in a 1976 Commentary Magazine symposium entitled What is a Liberal -- Who is a Conservative? (pdf; large), Kazin located Kristol within the spectrum of post-1945 "American political conservative[s]," "usually supernationalist," and, "[i}f, as often happened, . . . a disenchanted ex-Leninist like James Burnham or Irving Kristol," "he tended in the way of converts to keep his old elitist principles but to transfer his heart's desire from the intellectual fantasy of human nature made 'new' by 'socialism' to the tough "realism" of accepting and abetting everything political racketeers like Nixon and McCarthy did in the name of anti-Communism. Who is not with us is against us. It was not only the Stalinists who practiced that."
Daniel Bell, in contrast, did not see the world through a single lens, regarding himself as a liberal in politics, socialist in economics, and a conservative in culture:
I don't regard society as a holistic system. You can be a radical in one area and conservative in another. I'm a liberal in politics because I believe in individual achievement and reward, in the idea of a just meritocracy. In economics, I'm a socialist, because community participation is important to me: everyone is entitled to a decent share of the available resources. And in art and culture I'm conservative, because I uphold values and traditions.
Looking back from 2005, Nathan Glazer, who succeeded Daniel Bell at The Public Interest, noted that "the student revolt and the war against poverty . . . were to shape The Public Interest and to make it very rapidly something rather different from what was intended."
The emergence of neoconservatism in the 1970s
In 1972, Kristol supported Nixon, and Bell McGovern. That was the year Bell resigned from The Public Interest. Their different political trajectories testify to the ambiguities within the proto-neoconservative movement. Kristol came to believe, as he wrote in 1995 in The Public Interest's 30th anniversary issue, that "the distinction between conservative and neoconservative has been blurred almost beyond recognition."
It is difficult to recapture the intellectual and political temper of the mid-1970s. This was a time when Gertrude Himmelfarb, an important neoconservative intellectual in her own right and the wife of Irving Kristol, could write, in the same 1976 Commentary symposium as Kazin: "In America the label conservatism has been so thoroughly vitiated that it is hopeless to try to rehabilitate it." (And yet, Kevin Phillips wrote that "liberal has become so unpopular a term that Morris Udall(!!) chose to abandon it[in his 1976 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.]") In Himmelfarb's view, the then new term "neoconservatism" arose as:
a euphemism for those conservatives who cannot be dismissed out of hand, who have sufficient intellectual stature to make their presence felt. Liberals find the term useful to demonstrate their own broad-mindedness. (I recently heard President Ford described, in a gesture of magnanimity, as neoconservative.) And conservatives find it useful to gain a hearing for views which, under the old label, would be rejected out of hand.
Irving Kristol himself embraced the term "neoconservative," writing in the Commentary symposium, "the more I think about the term, the more I like it." For Kristol, "[p]ractically all those who are today [1976] called neoconservative were originally moved to 'make all things new.'" The "central ideological experience of their lives" was "[t]he collapse of 20th-century socialism as a viable political philosophy[.]" According to Kristol:
[T]here was no-is no-liberal alternative, because 20th century liberalism has, for all sorts of reasons, become a creed that can be fairly described as neosocialism; that is to say, it has become far more interested in equality than in liberty. . . . Out of this dearth of alternatives, American neoconservatism is born.
Neoconservatism as an ideology focusing primary on dmoestic policy .
In this telling of the story, proto-neoconservatism was primarily a domestic matter. Not because foreign affairs were unimportant, but because, until the Vietnam war shattered American liberalism and then Jimmy Carter became president, anticommunism as a fundamental basis of American foreign policy was a given. Michael Novak, summing up in 2005 what he called, "the creed of the neocons . . . in three structural propositions," put it this way:
- Economic realism, breaking from leftist utopianism, is fundamental; and the dynamic drive of realism in economics flows from mind, creativity, and enterprise. Also, in the real world, incentives help mightily.
- Politics is more fundamental than economics, for without the rule of law, limited government, and respect for natural rights economic progress is scarcely possible.
- Culture is even more fundamental than politics or economics, for without certain architectonic ideas, certain habits of the heart, a love for argument and evidence and open conversation, and a few other moral and spiritual dispositions, neither a republic respecting rights nor a dynamic capitalist economy can thrive, or even survive.
Enter foreign policy
The Public Interest was founded in 1965. Foreign policy as a defining issue emerged a little bit later. Here, the reaction to the student revolt, youth culture, and the anti-Vietnam war turn in the Democratic Party seem most causative. Writing in the 1976 Commentary symposium, Carl Gershman, now president of The National Endowment for Democracy, then executive director of Social Democrats, USA, and before that a leader of the Young People's Socialist League, observed that, "[s]ince an anti-Communist consensus prevailed on foreign policy, distinctions between the two terms [liberal and conservative] were drawn on domestic policy, with liberals generally in favor of, and conservatives against, state intervention to regulate the market economy and to protect the individual from economic
misfortune and racial discrimination." Gershaman dismissed (what he called) "New Class liberalism" as "committed to statist solutions" at home and "leftist-liberal faddishness" abroad, claiming that "they have a natural affinity with the 'progressive' anti-capitalist elites of Communist or Third Word countries." Gershman sought after, but did not name, a "new word . . . to identify the middle ground between the new liberalism and the old conservatism, . . . for it is upon this ground that the fate of democratic civilization now rests."
The break-down of the liberal anticommunist consensus explains why a hallmark of neoconservatism was its strident anticommunism and opposition to detente. But the distinctive expression of the neoconservative approach to foreign policy was the late Jeane Kirkpatrick's November 1979 Commentary article, Dictatorships & Double Standards, which subsequently led Ronald Reagan to appoint her ambassador to the United Nations.
Kirkpatrick's Commentary article is best remembered for its assertion that authoritarian (right-wing) autocracies are preferable to totalitarian (Communist) dictatorships because "the history of this century provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves. At the moment there is a far greater likelihood of progressive liberalization and democratization in the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile than in the government of Cuba; in Taiwan than in the People's Republic of China; in South Korea than in North Korea; in Zaire than in Angola; and so forth." [Her other defects notwithstanding, it must be acknowledged that, at least on an after-the-fact basis, Kirkpatrick was correct about at least three of her four examples.]
For our purposes, however, Kirkpatrick's neoconservative hallmark, in opposition to Jimmy Carter's human rights rhetoric, was her rejection of "the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances."
[N]o idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government. Many of the wisest political scientists of this and previous centuries agree that democratic institutions are especially difficult to establish and maintain-because they make heavy demands on all portions of a population and because they depend on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions.
The fall of neoconservatism
By the mid-1990s, according to Irving kristol, neoconservatives had become ordinary conservatives in the realm of domestic policy. And the collapse of the Soviet Union had ended the saliency of communism and the Cold War as defining foreign policy issues. Hence, in a 1995 issue of Foreign Affairs, John Judis felt able to write about neoconservatism as an anachronism:
None of these neoconservatives, whether or not they still identify themselves as such, continue to operate as a cadre. Indeed, they frequently disagree--about Bosnia, Haiti, and even whom to support for president. Both the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee for the Free World have disbanded. If neoconservatism exists in the 1990s, it is much the way that the new left survived into the 1980s--as cultural nostalgia rather than distinct politics. [Joshua] Muravchik, [Ben] Wattenberg, and [Frank] Gaffney are political anachronisms of the 1990s in the same way that Noam Chomsky and Richard Barnet became anachronisms a decade before.
And its rebirth
Only two years later, in 1997, a mostly younger group, led by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, formed the Project for a New American Century, the harbinger of what many (most?) people today regard as neoconservatism. The primary, perhaps exclusive, focus was on foreign affairs. The new neoconservatives started with a sense of malaise about national security policy: "American foreign and defense policy is adrift," began the PNAC Statement of Principles:
[C]onservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. . . . We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.
Invoking "a Reaganite of military strength and moral clarity," PNAC asserted the following four principles:
- we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
- we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
- we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
- we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Here we see the incipient ideology that Kristol and Kagan later would bring to bear to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Neoconservatism v. Neoconservatism
By the time of the Iraq war, the refounded, or revived, neoconservative movement differed in important ways from the original neoconservative movement that had started with The Public Interest group of public intellectuals in the mid-1960s and grown to embrace displaced Cold War liberals on their way to Ronald Reagan conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s. On foreign policy they had lost their skepticism about the exportablility of democracy; on domestic policy they had lost their scruples.
The neoconservative revolution in foreign policy can be seen in the contrasting quotations from Irving and (his son) William Kristol with which I began this essay:
- "The prospect of American military intervention and occupation to 'make democracy work' . . . something like an American empire with a purely ideological motive power . .. cannot be a serious option for American foreign policy." (Irving Kristol, 1991.)
- "Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower." (William Kristol, 2003.)
As for domestic policy, gone was their (at least rhetorical) commitment to the New Deal and intense focus on the limits of social policy. The new neoconservatives seemed interested in domestic policy more as a tool for achieving state power than as the primary arena of ideological engagement it had been for an earlier generation. Hence their willingness to accommodate almost any conservative or right-wing populist policy that promised funding and Republican electoral success.
Accordingly, if in 1976, it would not have made sense to speak of "neoconservative defense intellectuals, in a 2003 article in the New Statesman, Michael Lind could claim plausibly that "The core group now in charge [of US foreign policy] consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals," going on to name then deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, then Pentagon number three Douglas Feith, then Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Undersecretary of State of Arms Control John R Bolton, then head Middle East policy at the National Security Council Elliott Abrams, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and Richard Perle.
These names alone demonstrate the plausibility of Lind's claim. But what does it mean to say that they were "in charge" of US foreign policy? Lind focused on second and third level officials. Does this correctly identify the locus of control of US foreign policy?
Not, I think, if we listen to Daniel Bell who, once again separating himself from the neoconservatives, said in an interview published in the January 2006 issue of Daedalus: "I don't trust a politics geared to securing American hegemony. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest--I don't trust them." Bell focused, more properly I think, on the people who actually made the decisions in the Bush administration: Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Although both Cheney and Rumsfeld signed the original PNAC statement of principles, both of them were long-established, conservative Republican figures.
Indeed, PNAC began as a coalition. Other non-neoconservative signers included Gary Bauer (a prominent Christian social conservative), William Bennett (a Reagan and Bush I office-holder and social conservative), Jeb Bush (then a defeated Republican candidate for Governor of Florida), Steve Forbes, Fred Ikle (director of the U.S. Arms Control & Disarmament Agency under Nixon and Ford, and undersecretary of defense under Reagan), Dan Quayle, Vin Weber (a six-term Republican Congressman from Minnesota), and George Weigel (a social conservative and self-described Roman Catholic theologian).
Towards a conclusion
I began by asking, does "neocon" have some definite meaning connected to the intellectual histories of actual people (and if so, what is it?), or are we simply employing a politcal swear-word, as past generations, for example, used "communist" and "fascist"?
The answer appears to be both yes, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, and no.
- Yes, "neocon" can be used to describe some of the people who coalesced around The Public Interest, Commentary, and The National Interest, from the last 1960s to the late 1970s. They survived as an identifiable political tendency into the 1980s, although, as we have seen Irving Kristol note, they increasingly became indistinguishable from ordinary conservatives.
- "Neocon" also can be used to describe some, but not all, of the people who, beginning in 1997, coalesced around the Project for a New American Century.
- The problem is, however, that the neoconservatism mark I had different primary concerns than neoconservatism mark II. Moreover, on the central contemporary foreign policy issue of realism versus utopianism, the two versions of neoconservatism tak diametrically opposite positions.
- Hence, unless one is careful to explain what one means in talking about neoconservatism and neocons, what one means by using either term cannot really be known, beyond the fact that, here at least, these are generally words of opprobrium.
- Finally, I think that a little reflection should persuade us that many people who sometimes are called neocons, such as Cheny and Rumsfeld, are no such things. Did they ally with and make use of neocons? Yes, they did. But their political biographies and world views sets them apart from both versions of neoconservatism.
I conclude this essay, therefore, with a modest request: if you choose to use "neocon" or "neoconservatism," please explain what and who you mean, and why; if, for any reason, you don't explain, please respond positively if someon else asks you for an explanation.
P.S. I am aware of the neoconservative origins story that also focuses on Leo Strauss. See, for example, Benjamin Ross, George Bush's Philosophers, Dissent Magazine, Summer 2005.) I have several reasons for not including Strauss and his followers in my discussion.
- First, I do not believe that they played a significant role in (what I have called) neoconservatism mark I.
- Second, nor do I detect one in the organization and animation of neoconservatism mark II, as exemplified by the Project for a New American Century.
- Third, in all events, I'm not competent to discuss Strauss, his philosophy, his influence on various people sometimes identified as Staussians, etc., etc. Suffice it to say for the moment that, to the extent that Straussians may play an important role in neoconservatism mark II, this possible fact serves only to highlight further how far the mark II version differs from neoconservatism mark I.