Galun.com - The Neoconservative Mind

Notes: The Neoconservative Mind

Michael Harrington at Dissent magazine came up with the term "neoconservatives." Harrington was a leftist who was a former associate of the neoconservatives before they turned right.
"Howe once observed that the New York intellectuals were radicals or former radicals with a fondness for polemic and a highly developed sense of politics as tournament. The marks of neoconservatism's roots in this tradition - and particularly, its roots in the Trotskyist debates of the 1930s - would become evident in the movement's rhetorical style, its chief concepts, and its character."
"Moynihan's warnings about the 'law of unintended consequences' defined the movement's chief domestic concerns from the late sixties to the mid-seventies."
"Kristol regularly urged his partisan advisees to use greater cunning and deceit...in their campaigns...Thought he preferred to invoke Machiavelli, Kristol's emphasis on the ideological uses of deceit - like Burnham's - carried the imprint of his Marxist background. When asked about the proper role of morality in politics, Marx reportedly burst out laughing. The same bemusement was amply displayed in Kristol's writing on politics."
"Following Eric Voegelin, Kristol divided religions into two types, distinguishing between 'orthodox' and 'gnostic' faiths...Orthodox Judaism was orthodox because it emphasized the primacy of the Law and was unapologetically institutionalized. The distinguishing mark of an institutionalized orthodoxy was that it made peace with the world as it was...As a product of the 'gnostic millenarian bubblings' of first-century Judaism, he explained, Christianity was born alienated from the world. The early church attracted a following because it appealed to Jews who resented the Law and to others who were already alienated from the world. The central claim of the New Testament was the gnostic promise 'to achieve a radical reconstruction of reality, and a redemption of human beings from a condition that they perceived to be inhuman.'"
"Kristol allowed that Christianity's disaffection from the existing world was the source of its immense spiritual energy. Christinity's dethronement of the Law gave it spiritual advantages over such institutionalized religions of the Law as Orthodox Judaism and Islam. But in the practical world, he asserted, where institutionalized religions were most valuable, it was Christian teaching that 'creates enormous problems.' Kristol's chief example of such problems was Christianity's denigration of materialism. While Judaism and Islam both regarded the demands of commerce as morally unobjectionable, the opposite assumption was plainly evident in the New Testament."
"Orthodoxies were more realistic and conservative. Kristol explained that orthodoxies engendered a Stoic attitude toward the evils of the world. They offered spiritual consolation for afflictions that could not be explained or alleviated. Orthodoxies helped people cope with a world they couldn't change. When Kristol urged the clergy to become more interested in religion than politics, it was this kind of religion that he had in mind. He thus retained the Marxist view of religion, though not to Marx's purpose."
"Though [Kristol] allowed that biblical Christianity provided a possible warrant for progressive politics, Kristol contended that Christianity itself only survived the second century by shedding its original prophetic character. Faced with the destructive logic of its own gnosticism, the Christian church transmuted its teachings into an institutionalized orthodoxy...The problem with modern Catholicism was that it was becoming 'much more gnostic in its lack of calm acceptance of the world.'...The modern church's preoccupation with fairness distressed him...modern clergy and church officials were translating the otherworldly language of orthodoxy into a characteristically modern concern for social, political, and economic fairness. This preoccupation with the presume social mission of the church undermined the historical achievement of Christian orthodoxy. 'Religion is about transcendence, the eternal, not trying to change the world,' he insisted. 'Liberation theology has nothing to do with theology.' The modern liberal churchs and Third World liberationist movements had reverted to gnosticism and, thus, reverted to utopianism."
"Kristol observed that the architects of welfare-state socialism did not regard themselves as socialists. Their vision was technocratic. Modern social scientists eschewed the moral question about the nature of a good society. They asked themselves only how society's mechanical arrangements should be managed. Their essentially managerial conception of democracy filled modern textbooks in sociology, political science, economics, and journalism."
"Managerial democracy conceived democracy as a political system in which the mechanical arrangements of society were managed with maximum attainable fairness...He reported in the early 1970s that he couldn't help feeling that there was something ridiculous about this conception of democracy.... The absurdity of modern liberal democracy was the absurdity of idolatry, he argued, 'of taking the symbolic for the real, the means for the end.' Managerialism offered no purpose for democracy, only the perpetuation of democracy's political machinery. But the purpose of any worthy political regime, Kristol insisted, was to strive toward some conception of the good life and the good society. To attain the kind of democracy described in the textbooks, on the other hand, would be to construct a procedurally fair and well-functioning system that failed to explain why anyone should care about it."
"His basic foreign policy argument replicated his critique of managerial democracy. Kristol argued that every administration quickly lost its sense of direction in the foreign policy area. The reason this happened, he claimed, was that every administration inherited a cesspool of treaties, conventions, and alliances that the foreign policy establishment piously accumulated through its quest for a 'world community.' These commitments prevented American governments from pursuing America's national interests. America's foreign policy established claimed to believe in something called international law, which, Kristol contended, was a fiction that subverted the purpose of foreign policy itself. The foreign policy establishment assumed that pursuing the national interest was to be subordinated to the 'rule of law' in international relations. Instead of promoting America's national interests, American diplomats thus devoted themselves to building mechanisms that bound all nations under the code of so-called international law."
"America's ideology was legalistic utopia. The goal was American liberal internationalism was for the United States to have no foreign policy at all. The American creed subordinated American interests to the supposed interest of a phony world community."
"Egypt had governed Gaza for twenty years prior to 1967 and refused to annex the territory or even permit the Palestinians to visit Egypt."
"Kristol favored Yigal Yadin's largely ignored proposal for Israel to withdraw from part of the West Bank. Under Yadin's proposal, Israel would unilaterally annex the Israeli-settled and strategic areas of the West Bank - comprising approximately 25 percent of the West Bank - and withdraw its troops from the rest of the area....He speculated that Jordan would probably seize the territory, but if a Palestinian state were formed instead, Israel's military forces would be forced to keep it in check. In either case, Kristol argued, this solution would be more tolerable for Israel than its current futile attempt to police the occupied West Bank."
"For [F.R.] Leavis, the literary vocation was the supreme calling. His faith in the importance of literature explained his disgust with nearly everything he read. As Podhoretz recalled, 'Trilling's eyes did not blaze with a fierce Calvinist light upon the written word, he did not erect the capacity for "true judgement" into the very principle of being, he did not conceive of criticism as the row of the Lord's wrath.'"
"Leavis saved his most abusive polemics, however, not for bad novelists, but for those who disputed his critical opinions. He tried to temper his ferocity with his students, seeking to encourage 'independent critical judgement' in them. But even Leavis's students trembled at the prospect of disagreeing with him. Podhoretz recalled, 'To express the view, say, that Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" was a great poem, would elicit from Leavis a look of such long-suffering, such pain, such weary and hopeless resignation that one might have refrained from speaking up out of compassion for him, even if one were not already terrorized into silence by the fear of convicting oneself of an incapacity for "independent critical judgement."'"
Podhoretz believed that "Jewishness did not depend on the existence of Judaism or the survival of Jewish moral values. Jewishness inhered simply in the activities of Jews themselves, rather than any theology, ideology, or ethos that might be offered to define them."
Commentary published Chomsky, Robert Heilbroner, Harrington, Howe, and Norman Mailer during the 1960s, even as it was criticizing the left!
Podhoretz believed that "A new conservatism was ... needed that would take up the old liberal mission of winning the world for democract. The United States was morally worthy of playing the dominant role in the world, Podhoretz insisted, because America was the least repressive nation in the world. This was not to assume that America was always morally required to repel communist advances wherever they occurred. America's national interests didn't extend to every corner of the world. Vietnam was a good example...The pernicious legacy of the Vietnam War, however, was that the wrong lesson was constantly being drawn from the failure of America's intervention there. America's war in Vietnam was wrong only for practical reasons. The war hadn't served any national interest large enough to justify the enormous loss of blood and treausre it required. The purpose was honorable, but the price was too high."
Eep - Podhoretz wrote a piece, "The Culture of Appeasement," blaming America's spirit of appeasement and weakness after Vietnam on homosexual intellectuals, just as homosexual intellectuals had poisoned England after WWI!
Podhoretz "had confessed in 1964 that in thinking about the Jews, he often wondered 'whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant.' He knew why the Jews had previously insisted on surviving as a distinct group, but with the loss of that earlier theological memory, he remarked, 'I am less certain as to why we still do.'"
In 1968, Emil Fackenheim answered the question, "What did it mean to be a Jew in the modern world? Fackenheim argued that it meant, above all, to be a witness to the Holocaust...It was not that the Holocaust provided a new purpose for Jewish life....To ascribe a purpose to Auschwitz, religious or not, was blasphemous. But if it was forbidden to ascribe a purpose to Auschwitz, it was utterly necessary to make a response to it. The Voice of Auschwitz called religious and nonreligious Jews alike. It was not a redemptive, but a commanding Voice, which declared: 'Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.' In ancient times, the most heinous sin for a Jew had been to commit idolatry. After Auschwitz, Fackenheim argued, the most heinous sin for a Jew was to be an accomplice to the further destruction of the Jewish people."
Podhoretz "was convinced that the seemingly dimished Soviet threat was actually greater than ever. In mid-1989, Podhoretz was still claiming that Gorbachev was a crafty Leninist who had figured out how to strengthen the Soviet empir eand disarm the West. His touchstone was the theory of totalitarianism... For Podhoretz, it was axiomatic that totalitarian systems were fundamentally unlike all other political structures. The rulers of totalitarian regimes had no room for capacity to seriously reassess the national interest, Podhoretz claimed. It was ludicrous to think that Gorbachev would undermine the basis of his rule by opening the Soviet system or dismantling the Soviet empire. (Podhoretz inveighed against the Arias Peace Plan for Central America on the same grounds, arguing that it was 'naive to the point of dementia' to believe that Nicaraguan Sandinistas would ever permit a legitimate election.)"
"A friend described [Michael Novak], during this period [late 1960s], as someone whose temperament was conservative but who thought himself into left-wing positions. By 1970, Novak's distaste for most of the antiwar movement moved him to temper his positions as well."
Early in his career, Noval criticized the melting pot as "a Northern European construct that sacralized the values of WASP elites, whose culture was repressed, rationalistic, moralistic, reformist, obsessed with cleanliness, and above all, individualistic. It loosened the bonds of family ties to enable individuals to become successful. It was devoted to material success and to controlling self and society through reason...'Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe had to learn order, discpline, neatness, cleanliness, reserve,' Novak explained, 'They had to learn to modulate emotion, to control passion, to hold their hands still, to hold the muscles of their face placid, to find food and body odors offensive, to quieten their voices, to present themselveas as coolly reasonable.' America assualted their natural earthiness, their passion, and their blood-rich culture. Ethnic immigrants, he observed, retained thicker family and kinship ties than WASP Americans. The thickness of ethnic culture was a bulwark against utopianism and other deracinated WASP enthusiasms."
In his book Invitation to Sociology, "Berger asked his student readers to consider the example of middle-aged Joe Blow. Having reached middle age, Mr. Blow accepted the fact that his wife would never become more attractive and that his job as an assistant advertising manager would never become more interesting or rewarding. He looked back on his life and decided that his earlie rdreams to fornicate with many beautiful women and write the great American novel had been immature. This was what society called maturity. Maturity was the state of mind in which one relinquished one's dreams of adventure, achievement, and fulfillment. 'It is not difficult to see that such a notion of maturity is psychologically functional in giving the individual a rationalization for having lowered his sights.'...The rationalization that society venerated as maturity was one of the most powerful control mechanisms by which society imprisoned its inmates, he argued."
"An oversocialized account of the human subject reinforced human tendencies to evade personal responsibility for important decisions. People often said, 'I must do this,' when they were actually making a voluntary choice. '"I must" is a deceptive explanation in nearly every social situation,' Berger claimed. The essence of bad faith was to pretend that something voluntarily chosen was necessary. 'Bad faith is thus a flight from freedom, a dishonest evasion of the "agony of choice."'"
"For Berger, the idea of participatory democracy epitomized the depravity of the Movement. For all of its railing against authority and centralized power, the Movement was driven by its contempt for ordinary people to embrace an incipiently totalitarian conception of politics. The participatory ideal of the New Left violated the fundamental precept of any humane politics, which is to leave people alone. 'It is of fundamental importance to reiterate, in the face of these ideological abberations, that human life is infinitely richer in its possibilities of fulfillment than in its political expressions, and that it is indeed a basic human right to live apolitically - a right that may be denied only for the most urgent reasons.'"
"He was content to leave politics to the professional and the special-interest elites. Those who moaned about the loss of citizenship under modern democracy failed to appreciate that most people were commendably disinterested in politics."
According to Berger (and his wife), in their article "Our Conservatism and Theirs," the crucial difference between neoconservatism and paleo-conservatism is "'the area of modern consciousness, and specifically the experience of relativity - the awareness that all world views and value systems are contingent upon specific historical and social circumstances.'...Since the social world was relative and 'makeable,' the test of a worthy social doctrine or practice was whether it worked. They observed that it was primarily in the modern social sciences that the experience of relativity and the necessity of a pragmatic outlook had been theoretically elaborated. It was thus no accident that most neoconservatives were social scientists, while most conservatives were 'generally hostile to all the social sciences and especially to sociology.' Most conservatives regarded their beliefs as given, but it was precisely this faith in the givenness of moral and social values that the experience of relativity negated."
"The Bergers cautioned that their argument did not preclude making truth claims. The plurality of world views and the constructed character of social knowledge did not preclude the possibility that one world view was true. The difference was that one became aware of having chosen certain beliefs. The experience of modernization was fundamentally a 'movement of the mind from destiny to choice,' they explained. To comprehend the reality of pluralism and relativity was to lose the intellectual innocence plaintively claimed by most conservatives. 'We cannot participate in the alleged certainties of the other conservative groupings,' they declared. 'We are, if you will, conservatives not by faith but by skepticism.'"
"[The Bergers'] faith was a theologically liberal form of Lutheranism. They noted that Lutheranism was the most socially and politically conservative of the major Christian traditions. While recognizing that the church was required to involve itself in the public realm, the Lutheran tradition was characterized by a deep mistrust of perfectionism and utopianism of any kind. The Bergers shared this attitude. Lutheranism opposed not only the utopianism of the political Left, but also the perfectionist absolutism of Protestant fundamentalism. In Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms, they found a compelling analogue to Weber's distinction between the ethic of absolute ends and the ethic of responsibility. The Bergers claimed that modern mainline Christianity was distorted by its introjection of the absolute moral ends of the gospel into the public realm. Modern churchs blurred the distinction between the realm of the gospel and the Spirt and realm of the law and the sword."
According to Russell Kirk, the difference between neocons and paleocons was that "The neoconservatives were utilitarians in their view of society...'They are focused on the struggle for power, and are using power for their mundane purposes.' In his view, they had little sense of the mundane order as a realm subordinate to the transcendent order. The paleoconservatives' hearts were in history, theology, and humane letters, he explained, neoconservatives were social scientists and activists, like the New Class liberals they derided. Like the liberals, their politics was therefore utilitarian, instrumnental, self-promoting, and power-oriented. The modern battle between the conservatisms thus replayed the conflict between Burke and Bentham."
"The major theorists of neoconservatism were raised to think of 'the Americans' as aliens. America belonged to and was defined by the WASPs. Many of the neoconservatives applied to college just as their country's doors were opening to them. Podhoretz entered Columbia in 1946 under a 17 percent quota for Jews. To their own surprise, however, the neoconservatives prospered in the land of the Americans, and became its apologists. Their movement began as a counterprotest against a later generation of ungrateful American children. The neoconservatives' revulsion for the New Left's anti-American self-righteousness awakened their own unsuspected patriotism. Their own lives revealed the worthiness - even the superiority - of the American idea. 'I urge my readers to think back to their own families, circa 1935 or earlier,' Michael Novak exhorted. 'Were they from a privileged class? Or were they poor? Generation after generation, the poor have streamed into America and been lifted out of poverty.' The implicit call for gratitude was perhaps the movement's most compelling theme. It tapped the wellspring of American conservatism. It assured neoconservatism of a viable future, despite the movement's intellectual fragmentation. And it informed the neoconservatives' remaining domestic crusade, against the culture of the New Class."
"Neoconservatism was held together by more than its anticommunism. All of the movement's major figures supported a minimal welfare state; all of them touted the superiority of capitalism and capitalist modernization; all of them vehemently condemned feminism, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and other adversary culture assaults on traditional Western values. Kristol recalled that Podhoretz and Decter chided him throughout the 1970s for capitalist boosterism. For the, as for Novak, a residual identification with trade unionism and social democratic anticommunism had precluded any explicit apologetics for capitalism...The neoconservatives overcame their vestigial anticapitalism in the late 1970s, however...This conversion allowed them to give voice to certain quietly kept sentiments forbidden in progressive intellectual circles. For many neoconservatives, the experience of breaking ranks was a liberation from what they called 'the tyranny of acceptable moral lines' and an opportunity to give free reign 'to previously inhibited sentiments and ideas.'"
Neocon women hated feminism because they became intellectual successes without it, and they regarded demanding help from society as demeaning.
"The founding generation of neoconservatives never overcame their shock that many of America's privileged children turned against their country in the 1960s. Many neoconservatives found the antiwar movement more repulsive than America's incineration of Vietnam. The same overreactive revulsion was displayed in their subsequent attacks on the 'feminization' and 'multiculturalization' of American higher education. In their telling, modern American universities were overrun by hateful feminists, nihilistic deconstructionists, and ethnic tribalists conspiring to destroy the heritage of Western civilization through disingenuous appeals to 'diversity' and 'sensitivity.'"
"James Nuechterlein described the etiology of America's feminized cultural sickness. The fatal weakness of the feminized imagination, he argued, was its defining reluctance to exercise power. The feminized mind always looked for ways to transcend or avoid power politics, and when it failed, it exercised power only with a bad conscience. Feminized politics therefore promoted 'an ethic of noncoercion, a preference for emotion over rational analysis and for nomcompetitive modes of social interaction, a focus on being rather than doing and on interpersonal relations as the primary preoccupation of the good life."
Nuechterlein argued that there were two streams of liberalism, masculine and feminine. The feminine one spanned "liberal Protestantism's Social Gospel to the 'archetypal progressivism of Jane Addams to the feminized reformism of Eleanor Roosevelt." The masculine tradition included the Old Leftists and the New Dealers, "who prided themselves on their lack of sentimentality." It also included the Kennedy Administration, which "'virtually bristled with masculine assertiveness' and made no secret of its contempt for progressive moralism."
Neoconservatives "mourned" the loss of masculine liberalism. They believed that "Real liberalism was decimated in the 1960s by the Movement's feminist offspring. Nuechterlein explained that the triumph of feminization in the 1960s was engineered by modern feminism and sealed by the collapse of socialist and Keynesian ideologies. Feminism's language of morality and cooperation filled the void created by the Left's loss of hard beliefrs. 'Feminization has become a refuse for a Left in ideological crisis,' he contended. Feminism provided a sustaining vocabular for progressives while they struggled to replace their discredited ideologies and programs."
"'Wherever I went during the third and fourth week of the Gulf war, people were angry at the media, particularly at CNN and Peter Arnett,' Novak reported. 'What antagonizes people so is that many correspondents talk as if they were "above" being Americans,' he explained. 'They make themselves superior to the subjects of their stories, whether soldiers, generals or the President of the U.S. And they pretend even in wartime that they are neutral, above the fray, on Mount Olympus.' Journalists replied that they weren't paid to be cheerleaders for the government, but to report the truth as objectively and independently as possible. 'But this is phony,' Novak retorted. 'In their proud boast, "We tell the truth to power," they have forgotten something. THe freedom to tell the truth depends on who is in power. Their freedom, as it did in World War II, rests on a victory for our side. What do they think? That UNESCO would fight for their right to be impartial?' Novak argued that when America's foreign correspondents woke up each morning, they should remind themselves, '"My liberty to report the truth comes from the American republic - and from American military power. I am not neutral."'"
"Most neoconservatives were crusaders. They were not temperamentally suited for the kind of conservatism that merely tended to society's arrangements. Most of them were disinclined for the same reason to believe that a culture war was enough. It was axiomatic for them that America needed a foreign policy mission that served its most expansive international visions. The United States was obliged to wage an economic, politicsl, and military crusade for world democracy."
"If America's war in Vietnam had unleashed only an antiwar movement, neoconservatism would not have emerged as a phenomenon worth naming. Neoconservatism drew its converts from the Movement's various offspring. The Movement eventually challenged not only the moral legitimacy of America's intervention in Vietnam, but the legitimacy of America's established elites, the overreaching power of the military- industrial complex, the evils of American racism and sexism, and the environmental ravages of modern industrialism. The Movement produced currents that challenged hierarchy at every turn. The exhortation to question authority was taken seriously by movements unimagined by the liberalism of the 1950s."