At the library recently, I stumbled across a book whose title I have replicated above.
Although I was at first shocked at the title of the book, I decided it would be a good opportunity to test my critical thinking skills.
I realized that, over the past 6 months or so, I have uncritically accepted the "conventional wisdom" of the blogosphere, that neoconservatives are in some vague, sinister way bad for America.
Maybe neoconservatives weren't so bad, I thought. Maybe I should give them a fair chance to explain themselves.
So I read the book.
My conclusions after the jump.
Background and Set-Up
First of all, the book was, in many ways, exactly what I expected: lots of quoting from a laundry-list of well known neocons: Irving and William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and Francis Fukuyama. There were also plenty of references to the PNAC documents.
But this should not be particularly surprising, since the author, Douglas Murray, is only 27 years old. In neocon terms, he's a spring chickenhawk; so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's not a lot of in-depth philosophical probing in the book. It's pretty light and fluffy, overall.
But it DID give me a key insight into the real bedrock of neoconservative thinking, I think -- inasmuch as most neocons would agree with what Murray says.
Murray himself, interestingly, is quick to try to dispel that very notion -- the idea of neocon agreement -- and instead paint the entire "movement" as not a "movement" at all, and certainly not a "cabal", but rather a "mood", a feeling, a zeitgeist -- something that captures people without them even realizing it, an instinct that is only a natural response to the horrors of the modern world.
This attempt to paint neoconservatives as a diverse group pretty much falls flat on its face when one looks at even circumstantial evidence of the top writers of neocon theory. They are all, with the exception of Mr. Fukuyama (who has since disowned his necon past) white males (Francis Fukuyama is Asian).
Interestingly, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfield, Perle, and other administration fixtures who we here at Daily Kos think of as hardcore neocons are portrayed (as is Bush himself) as only "reluctantly" signing on to the neocon cause, and only after the horrors of 9/11 convinced them that their old-style "compassionate conservatism" would no longer suffice in the scary, new world.
Given the wide disparity between George W. Bush's presidential campaign and his actions once taking office, this is a semi-plausible explanation.
I won't dispute that what Murray identifies as neoconservatism is a "mood" some people DO find themselves in. But after a close and careful (and extremely patient) reading of his book, I have come to hope and pray that neconservatism is a "mood" that quickly passes.
Disagreements and (!) Agreements
I'll start with the most shocking part: there were actually some areas in which I agreed with the author of this neo-con manifesto.
Well, only one, really.
Central to Murray's explanation of why the world "needs" neocons is that it is a natural backlash against, as he puts it, the "disease" of relativism.
We live...in a thought-culture, but the thought has gone bad. There is one predominant thought-disease, a disease that links, and is carried by, all bad aspects of unhealthy contemporary thought. That disease is relativism...
Now, having studied philosophy, ethics and morality, I can agree with Murray here...to a point.
Moral relativism doesn't lead anywhere productive. But calling it a disease is, I think, a bit misguided. A lot of the ammo for his attack on relativism comes from Allan Bloom, who wrote against the revolutionary spirit on college campuses in the 1960's: and a lot of that reaction, I think, is simply an old, stodgy square (Bloom) and other stodgy squares like him fearing for their lives at the power of youth culture, especially as it was propagated by newfangled technology (color TV and, today, the internet).
Conservatives are squares (if I can be so bold as to make that generalization). Neo-conservatives, it seems, take a page from the book of Victorian morality and become super-squares, pissed off like hell that anyone would have more fun, more sex, or more freedom than they did when they were that age.
There is an almost palpable disgust that conservatives have for liberality (literally, liberty), youth culture, and anything new, strange or interesting. I can only imagine the nightmare they were going through in the 1960's and 70's -- an explosion of the drug culture, free love, Eastern philosophy, rock and roll (devil) music, and "flower power".
And they lay the blame for this explosion of unrestrained humanity squarely at the feet of that most putrid of all "liberal" diseases, the rot at the core of liberalism (literally, Murray uses almost that exact language in his book): relativism. "Your truth is just as good as my truth. Their culture is just as good as our culture. What's true FOR ME does not need to be true FOR YOU. We can all have our conflicting opinions and still all be perfectly truthful TO OURSELVES. La-la-la let's go drop acid."
I agree that these "strong forms" of relativism are pretty much bunk. Anyone with a serious education can see that. So why are conservatives and, now, neocons, so threatened by it?
Insecurity is my guess -- blind fear, panic, that they will lose all moral reference points in the world, and be reduced to shivering blobs of moral equivocation, their rigid intolerance of ambiguity driving them mad in the process.
Neocons are really sort of like your grandparents, shouting from their front porch as you drive off into the night: "There IS right and there IS wrong, dammit, and WE know WHICH IS WHICH, and by God, if you don't do what's RIGHT, we will BEAT THE TAR OUT OF YOU!"
That's it, right there. That's exactly what Neocons are saying -- at least according to Murray.
This obsession with relativism really gets out of control later in the book, where Murray charges that relativism inevitably leads to nihilism, a road "along which the confused, the lost, and the wicked have traveled for a generation" -- a road that, according to Murray, leads unquestionably to total nihilism and hatred of Western civilization, including Amerca.
(How and why this road unwinds naturally in this fashion is never explained; Murray just assumes that it does.)
Basically, if you accept the idea that maybe the Muslim religion has merits equal to Christianity, you're starting down a path that will lead you to hate America and our freedoms as much as the terrorists do (and, in fact, probably want to HELP the terrorists tear down our country and form of government).
This, to me, sounds a lot like the "marijuana is a gateway drug" argument used by anti-drug advocates.
I disagree with moral relativism to the same extent I disagree with moral absolutism: and since the neocons (and Murray) lean far too close to the latter out of fear of the former, it is on that point that we part ideological company.
Once that ideological cleavage has been made, pretty much everything else in the book became extremely hard to plow through.
On pretty much every issue, I disagree with neocons, because they start from false premises.
The premises of the neoconservative movement are basically as follows:
- America is the model democracy, and in fact, the model country.
- Every country in the world would be happier, healthier, and wealthier if they were just more like us.
That's it. That's the neocon belief system right there -- not a totality, but a sampling.
The conclusions that follow if you accept these premises are, as spelled out in the book:
- It will therefore be in our interest, from time to time, to help encourage, via foreign policy, other countries (especially ones with governments we really don't like, such as theocracies in the Middle East) to make a governmental shift towards Jeffersonian democracies.
- And while we're at it, we should reform domestic policy aggressively to promote traditional moral values, limit or stop immigration, teach Christianity in schools, and cut off welfare for unwed mothers.
You can see why I might not agree with all the premises, or the conclusions.
I believe, instead, that "He is a lover of country who does not excuse its sins" as Frederick Douglass said. But in the Neocon mindset, the criticism of our country is a problem, not a solution.
Neocons seem to be unable to see shades of grey and, as an overeducated intellectual, I just can't see eye-to-eye with people who want to lump the entire world into two categories.
The Evidentiary Quotes
These are the quotes I pulled out while reading, and my interpretations of them.
Their (anti-war) movement had shamelessly organized from the very first moment America was hit, not just in order to blame America first and prevent America from acting, but to claim that America has no right to act even if it wanted to...it found an easy and early alliance with terrorism.
Translation: to be anti-war is to be a terrorist.
...in the West today, the intelligentsia have a pathological aversion to celebrating their own culture. This is the area in which culture wars are of most value.
Translation: Damn liberal media, damn liberal scholars, damn liberal intellectuals. They all hate our freedoms. We should fight them in a "culture war" that is as important or more important than whatever other wars we're fighting on far-flung shores.
Murray is also fond of quoting a Bush speech at West Point that contained language to this effect:
We are in a conflict of good and evil, and America will call evil by its name.
Translation: whatever I don't like, I'll call "evil". And everyone will either agree with me, or I'll call them "evil" too. 'Cause I'm naturally right, morally. I was appointed by God. Heheheheheh.
How's that for relativism?
Government is not a brand, and government's job is not to win PR battles.
So why has the Bush presidency been marked by, to quote Stephen Colbert, "the most powerfully-staged photo ops in the world."?
What had occured [on 9/11] was an act of war...because governments had overtly and covertly applauded those deeds...The only countries that did this were tyrannies. Democracies were not just nice; they were America's only natural allies.
Translation: If you're not a Jeffersonian democracy, we reserve the right to pre-emptively invade you at any time, in order to install a Jeffersonian democracy. Otherwise you might be harboring terrorists.
In other words: The only way we can trust other countries is if they are just like us.
"We will occasionally have to intervene abroad even when we cannot prove that a narrowly constructed 'vital interest' of the United States is at stake."
- Kristol and Kagan, in Present Danger: Crises and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, 2000
Translation: Leave the invasions up to us. We decide who to take out: and we don't have to justify our decisions to the people who elected us.
More pearls lovingly quoted from Bush by Murray:
The twentieth century ended with a single surviving model of human progress, based on non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women and private property and free speech and equal justice and religious tolerance.
-Bush @ West Point
This is a Fukuyama idea, from The End of History and the Last Man, where he argued basically the same thing -- that modern liberal Democracies were the "end point" of history.
My question is, if Bush and neocons like the idea of liberal Democracies so much, why have they done so much to erode them in the past 6 years?
-- Human dignity eroded in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
-- The rule of law eroded by the passage of laws and acts in contravention to the Constitution
-- The power of the state expanded (Patriots Act I and II, the MCA)
-- Respect for private property eroded during Hurricane Katrina (and there's better examples, like states selling private property to developers)
-- Respect for free speech eroded by the concept of "free speech zones"
-- Religious tolerance eroded by the bolstering of faith-based (always the same faith) institutions by the Administration
Ironically, right after the above Bush quote, Murray said this:
During the following years, America's commitment to those principles was going to be tested...
Yes, we have been tested. But not in the way you were implying...
Murray later trots out the tired lie that all the Founding Fathers were Calvinist ministers (ok, I exaggerate, but you get the idea):
America has a fundamental and established faith that should enjoy just such special privileges...Thus children are commonly informed of the virtues and teachings of each of the major faiths, with no faith in particular taught--let alone the traditional faith of the nation and its founders.
Which was?
As I recall, the Founders were Deists, but trying to build a secular democracy with a clear separation of church and state.
Maybe they didn't teach that at Oxford.
Apparently, one thing they did teach at Oxford was Zionism...or maybe Murray picked that one up on his own. He says Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same thing (page 127) and, while I'm not an expert on the subject, I wonder if that sort of equivocation doesn't muddy the waters a little bit.
More fawning over Bush:
What Bush has lead the country to is -- neoconservatives believe -- a return to policies of which America should be proud, the instinctive policies of America and America's founders.
President Bush has reminded people that America's concerns are the world's concerns, and the world's concerns are the natural concerns of America.
Translation: America IS the World.
Or should be. We're working on it.
On the "liberal" media:
Ignoring stories that do not fit with the pre-agreed narrative is a problem for the press that should be addressed...a culture exists in which reporters are not merely content with being reporters, but wish also to be commentators on the story.
Translation: (again, thanks to Stephen Colbert): "The President makes the decisions...The press secretary announces them, and the press types them down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home..."
So, what is the danger of being commentators as well as reporters, instead of merely reporting?:
All too often, being a commentator means approaching each story from the same angle--hostile and cynical of government's intentions, in favor of the rights of Palestinian people over those of the Israelis, anti-war and so on.
You know, reality.
Or, at the very least, looking at a story from at least two sides -- which, in time of war, is clearly unpatriotic.
And which famous journalist or public figure said, "Every story has more than two sides?"
As a journalist-wannabe myself, I think reporting only two sides is still a failure of journalism. The world just isn't that simple.
The myth of decline is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A new conservatism will help eradict the myth and improve the reality.
Translation: Oh, no worries then. I forgot, neocons are really good at "creating new realities". Like the new reality of a Democratic government in Iraq....or the reality of Iraq-9/11 connections...or the reality of WMDs....or the reality of "last throes"...or, etc, etc etc.
Such a relief.
Conservatives of all persuasions must argue for and implement a vast increase...in faith-based schools. Such schools invariably produce better educated pupils, and consistently turn out better behaved schools.
Translation: It's essential that we produce more indoctrinated, fundamentalist Christians to do mortal battle against the indoctrinated, fundamentalist Muslims.
This attitude comes out again when Murray speaks about the EU, particularly on the exclusion of Turkey from it.
Even a common-trading Europe must be a Christian club, a meeting place of Christian-based states with a common cultural interest.
Translation: We want the Crusades, Part II. "There are many paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior." Credit the Colbert, again.
It is, as Gertrude Himmelfarb noted of the Victorians, more important to do good to others than to feel good oneself.
Translation: We know what is "GOOD" for you, even better than you do -- and, moreover, we reserve the right to "do" it to you whenever we please.
This is the attitude that is most chilling about neoconservatives, in my mind.
It's the same attitude that my parents had. "We know what's best, and we are going to make you experience what's best, because we can."
It's the attitude of a concerned family putting their nuisance of an uncle in an insane asylum, saying, "This is the best thing for you" and feeling proud of themselves for making such a hard decision, even though the uncle isn't really "crazy".
As regards WMD intelligence, far from admitting that the administration was flat-out wrong about the WMD charge, Murray not only parrots the "Saddam buying from Nigeria" claim but also argues that the U.S. and British governments, far from making a "noble lie" of the type Strauss would have recommended in this case, made a mistake in TELLING THE PEOPLE TOO MUCH (page 131).
In other words, neconservatives don't need justification for preemptive war. It's "because we know better than you do, and we know best." The ultimate Daddy party.
Speaking of preemptive war....
Pre-emption is the only possible policy...anyone who thinks [a strike on Iran] immoral or hawkish must simply state why they would be content and secure in a world living with the threat of a Tehran bomb.
Okay, I'll bite: I would feel content and secure in a world living with the threat of a Tehran bomb because I already live in a world living with the threat of an Israeli bomb. And/or an Indian/Pakistani bomb.
I hate nuclear weapons, I think they're evil, but I also think they're sort of inevitable -- and the fact remains that the U.S. is still the only country to have ever used them in war, and not once, but twice.
And maybe that's a poor comparison, but it's how I feel.
Neocons in a Nutshell
Thanks for a Herculean effort of reading through all this. Let me tell you, there were times I almost felt nauseous reading through Murray's book. Neoconservative thought is so similar to how my parents treated me and my siblings that it brought back uncomfortable memories at times.
Having been brought up in the thrall of such a morally infallible, consumed-by-rightness regime, I can tell you that it's not the sort of leadership that ought to run a country.
Here's hoping that the failures and corruption of the Bush administration break the back of this imperious movement for once and for all.