Several commenters on lyson's fine
strauss diarysuggested I post more on Neocons. Sadly, this won't have pictures like Mr. Leaker and Mrs. Wilson, but we're working on it.
What is a Neoconservative, exactly?
[They are] not normal people . . . they don't reason the way you reason, they're not motivated by human emotions such as rage and pity . . . they are calculating machines, they will look at the balance sheet, and they will see that they cannot win. -- Professor Groeteschele Fail-Safe. 1964
Okay, that's not the definition of a Neocon. It was a Hollywood neo describing, in the vivid way they love, the enemy of the time: Russia. It's cinema's first notable (near as I can tell) depiction of a neocon, the cold-hearted cold-warrior, Professor Groeteschele, played by Walter Matthau in Sidney Lumet's much underrated 1964 brinksmanship thriller, Fail-Safe,
So, what is a neocon? The scary-funny spelunking and family-tree climbing with the requsite Python in said tree,after the jump.
So, what is a neocon?
Well, under the tinfoil hat, neocons are romantics. Don Quixotes with obscure PhDs who tilt at enemies foreign and domestic with modern ordnance and old fashioned righteousness. Toss in a downright sensual appreciation for all things Apocalyptic--prose, politics and policy--and you'd be getting warmer; Dante warmer, if you get my drift.
Some of us liberals a la the old calpundit suggest that "Metaphysical speculation about the nature of evil is really neither here nor there", when it comes to discussing neocons, or their influence, and the policies they beget.
Ah, but it is. Evil is here, there, everywhere for the neocons, as it was for their now-dead Moses, Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Here, I'll let the acolytes describe the master:
Leo Strauss was the twentieth century's greatest teacher of political philosophy, and this site is dedicated to the Straussian tradition. Its specific intention is to serve as a guide to students caught up in this wonderful, overwhelming, and persecuted academic movement. [link]
"Persecuted academic movement."
Indeed. The political philosophy (I use the term loosely) with a stranglehold on Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of the the government of the most powerful country in the history of the world is persecuted. How quaint. And how revealing. Romancing the idea of good and evil is beatitude itself for the Straussians. Their philosophy is so flush with Freudian land mines of underdog-ism, persecution-memory and past disappointment mixed with grandiosity, you'd best beware: The laws of man and nature need not apply in the traditional, on-the-up-and-up sense.
So, to know a neocon, you must really ask "What's a Straussian?" I asked myself that same question once, seventeen years years ago, when Bush 41 picked Dan Quayle as his second, and Quayle, in turn, picked Bill Kristol as his chief campaign advisor. I didn't know much about Kristol at the time but had been subjected to the ideas of his dad, Irving Kristol, and those of his fellow traveller, Strauss, in college political science classes. In fact, the elder Kristol was something of a hero to my then-favorite professor, a mad ex-pat Hungarian named Zarzar. But at the time I didn't understand. How could one--Zarzar, the admirer, or elder-Kristol and Strauss, the patrons--flip from socialism to conservatism and not need a brain transplant, or at least a whole-body transfusion?
So I went back last year and reread, and it came back to me: If you bend your brain in just the right way, in just the right, odd, reactionary way, it was clearer. Not crystal, but clearer. Problem is, who has the time or the inclination to walk in the shoes of a neurosis masquerading as a political ideology, albeit an ascendant one? This requirement for simultaneous political spelunking and mental gymnastics all at once is the reason today's policies are so misperceived or ignored by those who should be monitoring such things--the media.
Back to the lessons of the mad Hungarian:
The mainline, academic neocons were primarily reformed leftists: ex-communists (oops, I mean proto-marxists) and disillusioned socialists of whom time has washed clean their sins the hard way. With the failure of their old ideology, it was as if they and their world were flipped upside down and they themselves, up, into the air.
To add insult to injury, at their apogee, mainstream America was only too happy to use them for skeet practice before they landed with an inglorious thud. Ouch.
Like any wanderer, fresh from the Road to Damascus, their zeal far outweighs that of those born to an ideological bent. They were once Revolutionaries. They are still revolutionaries. Except now, The Right has title to their biblically ordained hormones. And this time, they have JDAMs.
Biblically ordained? Aye, more than you may know. Remember, these are absolutists, believers in dyads, severe polarities--yes or no, not maybes. You're either free or in bondage. Your own man, or a prisoner of The State. And, after dwelling in the land of agnosticism, utopian debate and secular Socialist disappointment, where else would an ideological vagrant go but to the beckoning, untried, "Virtue-centric" side of the tracks? There lay certitude and hot coffee, good and evil, black and white. And three squares a day. And a Republican Establishment in search of a new defining ideology.
A home.
Quite a comfort, when up until then, your mental, and loosely voiced, spiritual ideals had met with man's irrational unwillingness to do things that made rational sense. Yea, Eureka!, they exclaimed: The problem is not with theory, it is with the unreformed man himself!
"We," the neocons thought, "are the select who have seen the light." So began an odd, now some 50-years old relationship with faith-based politics and faith-based intelligence and faith-based anything. The task was set: saving the aforementioned Man, in the shape of the American public, and also the world, from its unenlightened self. From places like the Rand Corporation, the Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute and others, they've been struggling to save us barbarians from ourselves ever since.
Of course, this preachifying brings up an interesting contradiction. Oddly, these same conservatives who pooh-pooh "liberal prescriptives" as the elite condescending to show the common man how things ought to be use exactly this same modus operandi in their own thinking and formulations. The chief difference is that the neos' inspiration comes not from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, but from the Pantheon: Received wisdom as it were, from the teachings of Plato, Socrates, and the rest of the Greek Chorus, sprinkled liberally (sorry) with the teachings of that nice Carpenter from Judea. To their view, what makes their missionary political sermonizing literally paramount over the liberal premise is that theirs is cribbed from Olympus, or, from that other Mount, the one on the North End of the Sea of Galilee.
"Blessed are the cheesemakers", indeed.
Perhaps it's just a cruel joke then, that their poster-boy is an evangelical Paul, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He gets all the sexy coverage, but he's got plenty of back-up. There's the grand patron, the current Lorenzo Di Medici of the neocons: Dick Cheney. His Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, and Libby's chief aide Eric Alderman are neos too. There's Wolfowitz immediately under neocon-dabbler (but not convert), Donald Rumsfeld at the the Pentagon. Under those two you find Douglas Feith, an undersecretary, and various influential but unassigned ex-government neo-goblins like Richard Perle (former assistant secretary of defense), and James Woolsey, (former director of CIA).
Like any good organization-to-organization embrace, neocons are six wide and six deep throughout any institution that matters in DC, public and private. Elliott Abrams and Robert Joseph in the National Security Council, Under Secretaries John Bolton and Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.The aforementioned Kristol the younger, along with Michael Ledeen, Thomas Donnelly, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Joshua Muravchik are all prefects at neocon high school: The American Enterprise Institute. And don't forget Neocon War Corps Central Command, the Project for the New American Century. Toss in Orrin Hatch, Newt Gingrich and countless others and you've got an I-Know-Better-Than-You-What's-Best-For-You Hoedown.
Orbiting drunkenly around this cadre of insiders is a whole Ark of pundits and talking heads who have barely clue one how Straussianism and neoconservatism really views the great unwashed--or what its greco-theocratic, wiser than thou underpinnings really are. They just love the new whiffle bat they've been given to use on the bleeding hearts.
So, where exactly do they derive their ideology? We know Strauss gave birth to this brood, but where did he get his ideas? Well, the Sermon on the Mount reference was no joke. Ditto the Mount Olympus thing. Strauss and acolytes like Alan Bloom and Albert Wohlstetter, ex- of the patient zero of conservative think tanks, the RAND Corporation divined their world view from The Ancients, as they like to call them--The Persians, Greeks and Romans on through to renaissance thinkers, but mostly the Greeks.
The neos' infatuation with this Nico-Manichaeanism--I guess what you'd call a hybrid of Machiavelli's power ideas blended with those of Manes of Persia, and then the Greeks--a bright line view of the world as Good or Evil, Light or Dark--is clearly apparent in their domestic and foreign policy beliefs and execution, if, as I said, you know what you're looking for. It's explained better than I ever could here:
Manichaeanism holds that principles of Light and God contend with Darkness and Matter for hegemony over the cosmos. Human beings in bondage to Darkness and Matter can free themselves to unite with Light and God through severe ascetic practices and adherence to the teachings of the Manichaean elect, who shall one day be united with the Light. Manichaeanism thrived in the ancient world as a missionary religion. Augustine of Hippo was attracted to the Manichaeans in his youth before becoming a Christian. [link]
Yeah,
that Augustine, the big guy:
Saint Augustine. Before he sobered up and became the Gretzky of religious philosophers. And yes, "The Manichaean Elect." That would be first, the Strauss-Kristol-Wohlstetter Axis, then the Cheneys, Perles, Wolfowitzes, and the whole AEI crew. A witches brew of creeds, colors, spotty track records and cranky authoritarianism, here to save us from ourselves and our flabby thinking. With ideas of their own like preemptive war based on a hunch. And democratization at the point of a gun and the boom of a Bunker Buster. Now, if all this reminds you of Washington DC's 1861 socialites jaunting off to a local hill top to witness the proceedeings at Bull Run as if it was a Saturday Matinee, you'd be wise indeed. Many of the neo hawks are of the
Chicken variety, as in Chicken-hawk, as in never fired a shot in anger. As in never served and got deferments to avoid that discomfort when duty and country called. Vice President Cheney has famously said "I had other priorities."
They have no qualms, however, about telling the military that they don't know how to fight. Or what war is "really" for.
By now, it should be understandable how Richard Perle and David Frum (Ex-Bush speechwriter, the "Axis of Evil" guy, also neo) can at once usurp the biblical job description of God himself--the eradication of Evil, tentatively titled, Armageddon--then up the Holy Ghost's timetable and coopt it as a how-to-book for armchair Ceasars: An End to Evil: How to Win the War On Terror The hubris is not imaginary, the naivete however, borders on delusional.
Oh, what the hell. It's nuts.
Wait. It gets better.
"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." -- Rochefoucauld
The spud in the tail pipe of this movement for many "don't tell me, show me" type Americans is that Straussians think that 'the virtues" are vital, but personal "virtue" is not an absolute requirement to preach said. In other words, Virtue is a good thing always and imperfect man may be imperfect, but that should never preclude him from telling others how to live virtuously.
Sound convoluted? Sound familiar? Witness the Bill Bennett (virtue-meister and Neocon Shaman) penchant for Las Vegas' one-armed bandits and compare it to the tepid response he offered as the media-required mea culpa: I may have overdone it, but I didn't endanger my family, I don't have a problem. Over the course of several years, he pumped roughly $8 million simoleans down the tubes feeding a Vice frowned upon and even shunned in many circles of faith. He honestly believed--or, tried to spin--that there is no cognitive dissonance, no failure of virtue, in the quandary many perceived him to be in.
Now, to Mrs. Bennett, there seemed to be a bit of a question on this point. But to his adherents, to the faithful, Bill's heart was in the right place; the Sunday School lessons he peddles are ones they adhere to, if not regularly, therefore he gets a pass. Sure, facts are meddlesome things when larger ideals like your idealized self or collective identity are at stake. But just to add an exclamation point, Rush Limbaugh (useful blowtorch, but not neo) thoughtfully came out, came down, checked into rehab, filed for his 3rd divorce and proofed the "free pass" theorem for all. Things like impeaching the credibility of a "witness" as the lawyers call it, don't really have traction in the neocon tent-meeting. If you pay your dues. And if you lead the Halelujahs.
(To be fair, for a rough equivalent wonder back to the O.J. trial and you'll remember how seldom logic need apply in the clash of worldviews.)
In this way, membership in the neocon clan is ironically very much like one of their favorite scratching posts, the oft-maligned government job. Once pledged to the club, barring live-boy or dead-girl events, you're in for life. This accepted, and abetted, lack of ironic regard for ones own actions is rampant, and seemingly, very freeing for the right: Virtue failure is proof of virtue, just not for Liberals.
It's also a new fashion that conservatives of the generic stripe are learning to love. And why not? It works. For anybody. For gaijin like the Delays (not a neo, just a spiteful, selfish man), for the Limbaughs (again, not a neo, just likes the bullying, John Wayne aspect), for the Frists (not a neo, just a man who forgot his Hippocratic Oath, yet remembers healthcare and pharma lobbyist names). It works for Colin Powell (also not neo), always regarded as a "Political Soldier" at the Pentagon and earlier in his career, yet somehow retaining the sheen of being above it all. He's now forced into personal torture and paroxysms of illogic, team-talk and stonewaling thanks to the willful neocon subversion of an armload of military and foreign policy doctrine he holds dear--and, co-authored. Don Rumsfeld's Iraq plan and post-war lack of plan and exit strategy is Anti-Powell Doctine.
Strange. So what exactly is "working"? Nothing really. Unless "because I said so" and "you don't get it, do you?", confidently and somberly delivered relentlessly, counts as a political construct and apparat. That's the big joke. In many ways, President Bush is the punchline to that joke. (Not neo, not a congregation-member, just a virtual church-goer.) In Bush's neo-vetted and -scripted platitudes about America's role of freedom and democracy bringer to the world, he sounds like a giddy sophomore who believes with all his soul that if people would just listen people would all hear wisdom and reform their silly selves.
And it was quaint when we heard Rodney King say it. We expect fuzzy thinking from habitual offenders and college students. Difficult to take from the "Fuzzy Math" President.
There's nothing cut and dried or well formed about the philosophy once it leaves somewhere like Strauss' University of Chicago. Certainly, the Machiavelli aspect has remained firmly intact, albeit of what John DiIulio, former head of Bush's Faith-based Programs called the "Mayberry Machiavelli" variety. But the higher minded ideals of Socrates, Plato and the rest of the Greek Agoran All-Stars are Hallmark Card afterthought, if it's hauled out at all. Virtues like temperance, forebearance, charity, justice, honor take on an eerie silly putty quality when applied in their practical neocon executions. The track record resembles a high school physics experiment, as arranged by, say, a substitute music teacher: doomed, befuddling and quaint in it's naivete. That is, when it isn't simply tragic or blasphemous or, dehumanising to the subjects: Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. Abu Ghraib.
It seems neoconservatism is the blank slate that allows any wing of conservatism to view themselves and portray their particular ideas as the only saving grace of a nation--nay, salvation from tax "Holocaust". If only people would listen and not keep getting bogged down on things like reality, moral consistency and the imperfectibility of the messengers. In a uniquely politico-religiose way, it's Manna from heaven straight to a neocon flack's word processor. Pie in the sky, for everyone. A chicken in every pot. As long as you don't ask where it came from, or who it belonged to before it landed on your table.
Again, those pesky workaday "show me" type Americans may have a problem with this "nuance," once explained, because the idea of Fairness is ever-present in the back of their minds. As Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, "No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally being bewildered as to which may be the true." At the neoconservative center, there is no plan that plays to logic, only power-hunger, along with constant probing of political enemies to maintain that power, to keep fellow citizens rocked back on their heels and pliant. As the neocon wheels come off, slowly, grudgingly, the politics are revealed as pique and failed, paranoid bullet points to the even mildly observant.
Still, with events unfolding as quickly and perversely as they are, who's got time to wait for the wake-up? Media, certainly, are no help in contextualizing the tectonic shift for those of us with other things to attend to. (Neocons don't change hairstyles or favor sweaters very often, they make boring article fodder.) Those with a megaphone who do recognize that something is truly awry are stymied: Does my doubt, spoken clearly and out loud, undermine the larger goal of maintaining our security? Do I feign ignorance and keep my access? My job? Indeed, "would I be counted with them--the Evil Doers?" Of course, unvarnished, unspun truth in the news business finds itself in the company of words that were once rarely conjoined in polite conversation: words like "fifth" and "column", or "liberal" and "traitor". Needless to say, causing these jewels to roll off the tongues of your viewing and reading customers is not conducive to garnering market share or enhancing profit and loss statements. Just the opposite:
We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It's a great way to have your cake and eat it, too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket. I'm glad we found it, actually. -- Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard (the neocon "People Magazine")
Yes, he actually said that. Out loud. On the record.
And so the Fourth Estate--even the so-called "good guys"--has voted with its balance sheet, picked their Team, and now they're all partying together nervously, players, owners and referees. The spectators? You're on your own.
As we're seeing, this philosophy, with once impeccable Western cultural and intellectual roots has mutated into a marvelous tool for mass deception and herd-direction: its vacuous certitude belittles, even eliminates, the need for debate. Second thoughts or Devil's Advocacy are for wimps and Popes. Men of Action don't contemplate their navels, they poke a sword in someobody else's. Therefore, the same quixotic freelance thinking accrues for a military and foreign policy that hews to no understandable accord--the enemy is who we say it is, not who it ought to be; your choices are those we frame for you, in your best interest, by our estimation. Trust us, we're Spartacus. And you're not.
Perhaps you thought Iraq was about imminent threats from Weapons of Mass Destructon? Where on earth did you get that idea? Iraq was about a democratic Middle East or an oppressed Iraqi citizenry or about stonewalling UN resolutions or about whatever you need to hear to feel comfortable with us going ahead with the thing because, well, because you just wouldn't understand the larger reason: it's a good and evil, gotta do it kind of thing. Relax. Don't get your knickers in a twist, we'll let you know when we need you.
Simple huh? Neoconservatism is really a thing of beauty if you're from the High Priest school of leadership: On certain days, the tea leaves suggest flexibility, on others they demand steely resolve. And perhaps an invasion or two. Same tea leaves, different political necessity. But since only you can read them, and as long as you remain defiantly and confidently inscrutable, your lessers have no choice but to be befuddled, shocked and awed: This is especially effective with a shallowly-read, in-a-hurry, TV-centric media: "Surely there's a plan? Yes, this MUST be PART of the plan."
An example, from Perle and Frum's The End of Evil:
[We must] Accept the subcontinent's nuclear weapons as an unwelcome but unalterable fact and drop all remaining sanctions against India and Pakistan. The sanctions were ill conceived from the beginning. There was never the slightest chance they would succeed in halting either the Pakistani or Indian nuclear program. Their only effect was to estrange the United States from both countries.
The United States estranged from India? Gee, I did not know that. Pakistan gets a bye? Righto! Thank you, David and Richard. You da men!
You see, holding WMDs, the real kind--and not too firmly at that--is not the "pass go" for US invasion that we've been led to believe. Those capital B-A-D Ba'athists? They're not so unequivocally bad when Falujah is in flames and we need them to restore order. The Maximal Non-Equivocators of the Project for the Next American Century are not unreasonable men and women. They're willing to relax their rhetoric in acceptance of Lesser Evils and Realpolitik after all. For the "proper" reasons, of course.
Alas, if you were a neocon, this would be clear as Socrates' poison. All will be revealed. Honest. Swear to God.