Neo-conservatism blasted into the American political scene with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. However, its roots wind back through the U.S. political landscape to include Marxist social theory and the teachings of Renaissance philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. Many of the individuals whose names have become household words today were introduced on the world-wide political stage during the Reagan/G.H.W. Bush administration: Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, "Scooter" Libby, and others. This essay bares the core of neoconservative belief, contrasts those beliefs to statements written by this nation’s founders, and highlights the political spin neocons use when quoting documents from America’s past.
Leon Trotsky was born in the Ukraine in 1879. As an adult he was a Marxist theorist and became a central member of the communist revolution. He was one of the first members of the Politburo, the policymaking center and governing body of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, and founded the Red Army during his tenure as the People’s Commissar for War between 1918 and 1924. Trotsky’s political theory promoted "permanent revolution" because he believed that a workers’ state could not be sustained in a capitalist world unless other countries had socialist revolutions as well. A power struggle developed in the Soviet government when Lenin, its founder, became ill and died in 1924. Trotsky headed the Left Opposition, a group opposed Stalin’s philosophy that socialism could be built and sustained solely within the Soviet Union. Rather, Trotsky and his followers believed that revolutionary upheaval needed to be stimulated and nurtured in order to support and expand the Communist social and political structure. Trotsky was eventually exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929 for this opposition to Stalin. In 1938 Trotsky founded an international communist organization that he named the Fourth International to advance his anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist views. Trotsky was assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1940.
One well-known follower of Trotsky is Irving Kristol. A self-described Trotsky radical, socialist, and anti-capitalist, Kristol is generally considered the founder of neo-conservatism. He reaffirmed his politics in 1983 by stating that he was proud to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. After serving in the U.S. Army in WW II, he was managing editor of Commentary magazine, cofounder and editor of CIA funded Encounter magazine, and a professor at New York University. Additionally, he is the founder of both magazines The Public Interest and The National Interest. He is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute along with Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and former U.N Ambassador John Bolton.
Mr. Kristol is has cited the teachings of Leo Strauss as favored text for neoconservatives. Strauss was a German immigrant to the U.S. in 1937 and became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1949, staying there until his retirement in 1968. One of his books, Thoughts on Machiavelli, seems to encapsulate his political philosophy summarized in six points:
- A leader must perpetually deceive the citizens he rules
- Those who lead must appreciate that there is no morality; there is only the right of the superior to rule the inferior
- Religion "is the glue that holds society together." A ruler can manipulate the masses with it; any religion will do. Strauss does not advocate any specific theology.
- Secular society or secular humanism is the worst possible structure because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, all of which encourage dissent and rebellion. The leader needs a people that can be shaped and reshaped like putty.
- A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, Strauss maintains that if no threat exists, then one has to be manufactured.
- Liberal society dispenses with noble lies and pious frauds. It tries to found society on rational foundations.
These points are underscored by American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Michael Ledeen in his book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago, where he says,
In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to ‘enter into evil.’ This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired, and challenging. It is why we are drawn to him still..." (p. 91), and All’s fair in war . . . and in love. Practicing deceit to fulfill your heart’s desire might be not only legitimate, but delicious! (p. 95).
Ledeen explains the neo-conservative approach to any type of opposition in his book The War Against the Terror Masters when he writes,
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law.
This position supports his belief that
It is better to be more feared than loved. You can lead by the force of high moral example. It has been done. But it's risky, because people are fickle, and they will abandon you at the first sign of failure. Fear is much more reliable, and lasts longer. Once you show that you are capable of dealing out terrible punishment to your enemies, your power will be far greater.
Neo-conservatives believe that the U.S. should renew its virtue by reshaping itself in the 1930s image of post-Victorian Britain. The new Hitler is Osama bin Laden, who can be replaced by others when needed, as happened with Saddam Hussein and appears to be happening with Iran’s Ahmadinejad; President Bush is the new Churchill replacing Ron Reagan who filled that post earlier; political moderates, realists, and liberals are the Neville Chamberlains of this ideology; working class fundamentalists of the South are replacements for the "bourgeois dissenting Protestants of Victorian England"; and American universities are "the new Bloomsbury full of decadent liberals and leftists sapping the morale of young Americans". This comparison was made by neocons Donald and Frederick Kagan in their book, While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today.
Recent neocon comparisons to "Nazi appeasers" and Barak Obama acting "like Neville Chamberlin" are recipes from this playbook. Without belaboring the point with specific example after specific example, we see how this political philosophy is playing out and has, over the past seven years, become a Constitutional crisis.
In October 1787, the Federalist #1 was published. It was written by Alexander Hamilton and addressed to the People of the State of New York. This first of the Federalist papers was essentially an introduction to a series of eighty-five letters advocating acceptance of the newly proposed Constitution of the United States. This letter warns of obstacles that the Constitution will face. Two of these problems will be "the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument and consequence of the offices they hold ... and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire."
Hamilton recognized that a variety of motives influenced every side of any political question. He called for a system that supported moderation because "nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit, which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For, in politics as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword." If only our elected officials considered this before we were sucked, or is that suckered, into the quagmire that is Iraq.
Further, Hamilton states that history will show that "a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government" and "that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism, than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics the greatest number have begun their career, by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing Demagogues and ending Tyrants."
Republican House members wrote and signed the Contract with America in 1994. The preamble of that document says that its purpose is "to restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace (I wonder if Mark Foley read this part before signing). To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves." Had he been with us in 1994, I think Hamilton would have classified the Contract with America in the categories of fallaciousness and toadying.
Along with Hamilton, James Madison, considered the Father of the Constitution, wrote the Federalist Papers. In the Federalist #10, Madison noted that factions are both the product and the price of liberty. His view was that a faction was "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." He recognized that "men of fractious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests of the people." It is as though he could see the future!
Madison believed that the influence that factions wielded over a larger national government would be less that their influence over smaller state governments and that the governmental structure developed in the Constitution would minimize the influence of factions since the influence of the majority voice influencing the House of Representative would be buffered by the minority voice influencing the Senate and vise-versa. While it’s clear that he recognized the influence that money would have on his Constitutional government, I don’t think that he could have possibly imagined the amounts of money currently flowing into Washington or the organization of the lobbyists displayed by the K Street cabals.
Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831. He amassed copious notes during his travels which were published as Democracy in America Vol. 1 in 1835 and Volume 2 in 1840. The book deals with issues like religion, the press, money, class structure, racism, the role of government, the judicial system, and so forth. These issues are just as relevant today as they were then. Democracy in America has undergone several periods of popularity throughout this century, but it's never been as popular as it is now. Colleges around the country use the text in political science and history courses, and historians consider it one of the most comprehensive and insightful books ever written about the U.S. Two quotes from de Tocqueville jump out as relevant to this essay and to our current world situation.
"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it." We now face the real possibility of losing of our way of life partly due to the protracted war in Iraq; protracted indeed because our involvement in this war has lasted longer than our involvement in WWII; that very war to which the neocons liken the Iraq war. This invasion of Iraq is the manufactured conflict that Strauss said was necessary for a ruler to fabricate in order to maintain power. Drawing WWII and the Iraq war together through analogy fulfills the neo-conservative ideology of America as Victorian Britain: what they consider Pax Americus, American Peace enforced by American Empire. The neocons describe the current world situation as a "uni-polar moment" for the United States: a time where we cannot be challenged and are all powerful. Their dream is that it is America’s destiny to rule the world as the Roman and British empires did so long ago. What the neocons fail to recognize is that the so-called peace created by these two world empires was maintained by constant, never-ending war. How does peace exist when your nation is continually at war? Very simply ... it doesn’t! Many claim that the Roman Empire collapsed because of moral degradation and that the British Empire raised their conquered nations to the point that they could govern themselves; letting them go as would be expected from a benevolent parent. The fact is that the tax burden caused by unrelenting wars bankrupted the middle class, and destroyed the economies of both Rome and Great Britain. All Americans need to understand that world empires collapse because they overreach and are buried in mountains of debt as is happening to our country now.
The second relevant quote from de Tocqueville is, "The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money." This simple statement does not need any more elaboration from me.
When the Contract with America invoked Lincoln’s name, everyone missed the insincerity, "Like Lincoln, our first Republican President, we intend to act with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." The last thirteen words of this quote were removed from the final paragraph of Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Lincoln’s speech spelled out that both sides of the Civil War had suffered greatly and was intended to begin healing the nation after it ended. The entire paragraph says:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Clearly the neoconservatives that created the Contract with America, Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Dick Armey, and spin master Frank Lutz, felt a lot of malice and very little charity towards others, and had no intention to "bind up the nation’s wounds" or to achieve "lasting peace among ourselves and with all other nations." In fact, we now see that their goals were the opposite of what Lincoln wanted. The United States would have been better served if authors of the Contract with America had focused on one of Lincoln’s most insightful quotes, "Nearly all men can withstand adversity; if you want to test a man’s character, give him power." But so doing would have been contrary to Strauss’ teachings to deceive the public, the "right" to rule the inferior, and the use of religion to influence the masses. Machiavelli seemed to understand Aristotle when he said, "A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."
What has become clear to me is that we have forgotten those inspirational words from Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural speech, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." These words defined my parents’ age group as the greatest generation. Men and women who would not be intimidated by formless threats, people who demanded accountability for claims made. We hear a lot about how our elected officials must "grow a spine" and vote for what the American people want; they will not change until we, too, take a stand against those that perpetuate fear and hate. They will not change until we demand accountability for the claims made by those very people whose salaries we pay.