Just finished Jacob Heilbrunn’s book, They Knew They Were Right, a history of neoconservatism, and here is a quick reaction.
These guys were full of shit.
First, there is their strong ideological commitment to whatever gets them a job. They were so passionate about their beliefs, and changed their beliefs, their party, and their commitment, with every new set of underwear. Yet, somehow they have become the people who are committed to ideas and critical thinking.
Second, there is the way you have used the words "liberal" and "conservative" that reveals to complete vacuousness of the terms. They mean, literally nothing. They are code words for "the other side," whatever that happens to be. They are attached to no beliefs, no philosophy, no knowledge. They are as empty and devoid of meaning as are the endless evocations of "the national interest" to justify whatever hobby-horse the speaker wants to ride.
Finally, there are the profound falsehoods underlying all their thinking. Whenever given the chance, whenever they wrote something, did something, advocated something, enacted something, they were, consistently, repeatedly, completely, unwaveringly wrong.
The Team B exercise is the prime example. They came in to the CIA and quite rightly revealed the weaknesses in the standard arguments that the career analysts had lived by over their last fifty years of repeated failures. Nevertheless, they then replaced the conventional beliefs of the establishment with assertions that were spectacular in their glaring departure from reality. Somehow, everyone seems to forget that proving the other side is wrong does not prove that your side is right. There are, in a famous formulation, more than 2.0 sides to most issues (unless your view of policy is stricktly limited to the sports formulation favored by the news media).
Yet because they were a network, because they know that only by supporting each other through every failure could they be supported in their own failures, they hung together, kept their positions of influence, and at last reached a position where their mistakes and errors could permanently damage the United States beyond repair. They at last achieved their ambition with the Bush administration, because they were never held accountable for the wrong-headed – at times illegal – mistakes they committed under Nixon and Reagan and anyone else stupid enough to hire them.
Part of it was arrogance. They believed that they held all knowledge and wisdom to themselves, and if there were valid arguments showing how wrong they were, they knew that they could freeze their promoters out of publication and promotions, ignore them, or shout them down.
The prime example is Fukuyama. The man wrote an essay that got turned into a book based on ideas that had been soundly and thoroughly shown to be nonsense forty years before, in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. But because Popper could be classified as a philosopher of science, not politics, he could be ignored and remain unread, unappreciated, unheard. And patently absurd nonsense could create an entire career of pretentious bullshit.
The history of the neocons is a history of so-called conservatism writ small. Conservatism itself is an empty vessel. Its rise is based not on ideas, but advertising slogans repeated ad nauseum by an unthinking, uncritical media to an unthinking, uncritical electorate. It has no governing philosophy, and it should not have taken the hypocrisy of the Bush administration to expose that; the hypocracy of Nixon and Reagan were quite clear long ago.
The neocons have proven – while telling themselves, of course, the exact opposite – that ideas don’t matter. What matters in slogans, feel-good sound bites, and the ability to stick you nose so far up a mentor’s ass you can smell what he had for lunch. John Bolton is the epitome of the suck-up, piss-down mentality of the corporate shill culture that politics and government have sunk to today. He knows to nod sagely at whatever nonsense his superiors in the administration spout, while having a hissy-fit at whatever poor sap below him in the hierarchy has the gall to think for himself.
And it has worked. Brilliantly. Knowing that they only appreciate those like themselves, with no other agenda but their own ambition, they have populated the government, the media, the think-tank world, with people who know that no error counts, only loyalty. They have spent their careers gloriously failing upward, until their mistakes, errors, boners, boo-boos, misunderstanding, ignorance, and apathy have become the standard for scholarship, the apex of conventional wisdom, the unspoken – because if stated, easily recognized as absurd – gold standard for the idiocy we call public policy.
So you get people like now State Department Counselor David Satterfield, a career officer who is one of those guys that a friend of mine described as "so ambitious his eyeballs sweat." He abandoned his wife and two children for an ambassadorship, and his devotion to nothing but his own career, regardless of the consequences to the country and the government, has been well rewarded, as has the ambition of all the empty-headed clowns who have played the game so well, and so disastrously.
It would be easy to mention so many other names, names that go into the myriad factions within what the media blithely labels "the right," but which is really just a set of frat-boy cliques that compete, not based on real ideas and real understanding, but only for power and influence and the money they both create.
It would be easy to assign this history to some vast conspiracy to put morons in charge of the government, and thereby serve the interests of the corporate powers that want to destroy the government’s ability to limit their power, market share, and profits. But it is nothing so sinister nor so controlled as this. Certainly, Cheney and his followers have subverted the government to achieve corporate goals, but that has nothing to do with the poverty of ideas and intelligence that has been the rise of conservative and neoconservative cadres and so-called ideas. It has simply been a convenient movement away from responsibility and ideas that the corporations have taken advantage of, perhaps even without being fully aware of how well these people serve their short-term interests.
One problem is that corporations only recognize short-term interests, only pay attention to the sort of Darwinian pressures that elements in what is called the right profess not to believe in. The fact is, over the long run, the corporate/Republican destruction of the Middle Class will also destroy the foundations of the American economy (as well as their deliberate denial of responsibility for the maintenance of our infrastructure). The buffoons in the think tanks and policy periodicals can easily ignore their own failures, since there is no one but the tiny voices in the blogosphere pointing any of this out. This gives the clowns in the news media an excuse to ignore it, as well.
That was the real mistake Barack Obama made with his comment about Reagan’s ability to bring "ideas" to politics. He didn’t. Reagan had no ideas, at least none that were not erroneous, but he did have slogans. Reagan’s ability to win elections with bogus ideas dressed up in easily-digested slogans set the stage for Karl Rove’s subversion of democracy with his own brand of Goebels’ propaganda.
The problem is that lies are easy to turn into slogans; real ideas are not. Real understanding and real confidence in your own limitations are hard to turn into the tools of ambition. If a rational politician says, "I made mistakes, and I learned from them, and I know more now than I did then," he is vilified for having even been in error, as if the Republicans have not made careers out of being wrong about every issue they touch. If a politician says, "This is a complex, difficult problem, and we will have to work at answers, and try different solutions, and see what works, because there is no one right answer to all problems that works everywhere, for all time," he is called weak and vacillating.
Bush told us what his goal was when he tried to "reform" Social Security. He said he wanted to "fix it for all time." There is only one way to do that. Destroy it.
Real leadership is listening, which gets you called a flip-flopper. Real leadership is paying attention to ideas, which means you will somehow give someone looking for an excuse reason to be offended. Real leadership is telling people who are wrong that they are wrong, and their ideas have been proven wrong, and they don’t deserve a seat at the table.
I’m still looking for real leadership, because lies are rewarded, leadership is punished, and the truth is a ticket to obscurity.