Few terms in the American political lexicon have been as simultaneously ubiquitous and misunderstood as “neoconservative.” Is it another word for a hawk on foreign policy? Does it refer to a conspiracy of cryptofascists in thrall to the esoteric teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss? A Jewish cabal primarily concerned for the survival of Israel? The ideology behind the war in Iraq?
Self-described neoconservatives themselves would differ in response to those questions. “That is why everyone has fits trying to define them,” says a slightly exasperated Jacob Heilbrunn. And he should know. Heilbrunn, author of a new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Doubleday), has spent the past few years sorting through the many conflicting theories about neoconservatism.
This much seems beyond dispute: Neoconservatism grew out of the ideological battle between Stalinists and Trotskyites that consumed the left in the 1930s. More specifically, neoconservatives have traditionally been radicals or liberals who have tacked rightward on the political spectrum.
Heilbrunn, a senior editor at The National Interest, emphasizes that neoconservatism is not a systematic worldview but rather a malleable disposition that has gone through many transformations. He does highlight some consistent hallmarks: fierce anti-communism, a pugnacious intellectual style, a refusal to concede error, and a single-minded focus on vanquishing ideological foes, whether they be communists, liberals, or Islamofascists. Perhaps most controversially, Heilbrunn argues, neoconservatism is “ineluctably Jewish.”
While numerous commentators have linked neoconservatism to Jewish thinkers and policy makers like Douglas J. Feith, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, Heilbrunn goes so far as to argue that neoconservatism is a movement best understood as “a tempestuous drama of Jewish immigrant assimilation": An ambitious ethnic group creates a counterestablishment to the WASP, risk-averse, foreign-policy old guard. Despite protests from those who point to non-Jewish neoconservatives like the Roman Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and former U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett, Heilbrunn says, “it is anything but an anti-Semitic canard to label neoconservatism a largely Jewish phenomenon.”
A journalist who began his career revering neoconservative writers like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, Heilbrunn is now an unabashed critic of his former heroes. What was once an independent current of disputatious intellectuals with close ties to academe, he writes, has calcified into a partisan Republican cause dominated by Washington insiders. But, he is quick to add, despite the fact that “neoconservative” has become an all-encompassing epithet in the wake of the war in Iraq, those who suggest the movement’s demise are premature. “The neocons have been declared dead before,” he says, “and they always come back stronger.”
How central is the experience of the Holocaust and the fate of Israel today to the neoconservative mind-set?
The Holocaust and Israel are at the core of neoconservatism. The neoconservatives are often reluctant to acknowledge that publicly. I suppose it has something to do with the accusations of dual loyalty, which are a slander. I think the neocons genuinely see a coincidence of interest between America and Israel. They see Israel as an outpost of the West, a democratic bastion in the Middle East. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary, stated that it was time for Jews to begin evaluating American policies in light of how those policies might affect Israel.
A number of neoconservatives have lost relatives or ancestors in the Holocaust, including Wolfowitz and Feith. That goes some way toward explaining their hatred of the State Department, which they continue to view as a dangerous redoubt of WASPs intent on appeasing the Arabs and other foes; the State Department advised against recognizing Israel in 1948.
The Holocaust also accounts for the idealistic streak in neoconservatism and among many liberal hawks — the belief that the United States, and the United States alone, has the power to set wrong aright around the globe. The U.S. failed during World War II to prevent genocide. And the dominant impulse among liberals and neocons has been at least to attempt to prevent a repetition.
What significance did the attacks on the universities by student radicals in the 1960s have on the evolution of neoconservatism?
The 1960s were the crucible in which neoconservatism was formed. That was a cataclysmic event for these people. They were horrified. It wasn’t just an intellectual experience, it was a gut-wrenching, emotional one. They remembered when Jews were barred from universities by quotas, and they had managed — through sheer grit and intellectual firepower — not only to enter academe but to become great successes. And then there were these radical students saying it was all a fraud. They felt like their accomplishments were being personally assaulted. And the academic life, the life of the mind — which they viewed as sacred — was being debauched by radical students.
The neoconservatives had been deeply shaped by the breakdown of the Weimar Republic, in Germany, and the collapse of the academics in the face of Nazism — a phenomenon exemplified by Martin Heidegger giving a speech in 1934 hailing Nazism. It is interesting that Allan Bloom, who was at Cornell in the 60s, saw the black-radical movement there as a new totalitarianism. Donald Kagan told me that he had not understood Nazism until he saw the radicals at Cornell.
Do you see any connection between the attacks on the universities then and the barrage of criticism coming today from such people as David Horowitz, who has been supporting a “student bill of rights”?
In the 1960s, students were agitating for free speech and often targeting liberal professors as retrograde tools of the establishment. Horowitz, who participated in the excesses of the 1960s, is now rebelling against the rebellion he helped lead. He is trying to establish an authoritarian system, in which professors are sedulously monitored for their political beliefs. The continuity, I suppose, rests in Horowitz’s illiberalism.
Horowitz harkens back to the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the right was obsessed with imposing loyalty oaths on professors. Horowitz is reviving that impulse.
Why do you write that Irving Kristol’s decision to leave New York for Washington in 1988 marked a turning point for the neoconservative movement?
When the neoconservatives relocated to Washington, the movement became corporate and political. Neoconservatives used to produce original work on the American Constitution and other topics that weren’t directly related to the political fray. That is less the case today. In its early years, neoconservatism was much more influenced by academics than it was by political operators, but now it has become largely a movement of political operators, like Perle.
It isn’t that the neoconservatives are pulling their punches — they never do! — but that Irving Kristol, for instance, tailors his message to what he believes will be useful and effective for the Republican Party. The most obvious example of that is the neoconservative embrace of the Christian right, and its noisy defenses of creationism. The evangelicals do uphold a sort of religious traditionalism and morality that has long been part of the neoconservative war against the licentious behavior of the 1960s. So you can see why the neocons would adopt this tack. But it is shortsighted.
In addition, during the early 1990s, William Kristol talked about cutting back the size of federal government; a few years later he began calling for national-greatness conservatism, when that seemed like a message that might be a winning one. In retrospect, the stress on greatness was a precursor to George W. Bush’s embrace of a militarized crusade against terrorism.
The real impact of Kristol’s move is probably this: Neoconservatism began as an attempt to rescue liberalism from the liberals; now it has morphed into a movement that seeks to destroy liberals. In so doing, the movement has lost much of its intellectual sheen and independence. It has lost its intellectual edge. On the other hand, the move to Washington has been politically beneficial; had the neoconservatives not done so, they never would have obtained the political influence they have. The neoconservatives’ war on liberalism has allowed them to become the dominant force on foreign policy in the GOP.
What explains the notable defections from neoconservatism in the last few decades?
There is a long history of the best and the brightest intellectuals — Daniel Bell, Francis Fukuyama, Mark Lilla, Daniel Patrick Moynihan — fleeing neoconservatism because its rigidity is not hospitable to independent minds. I guarantee you that in eight or 10 years, some big neocon right now is going to jump over the barricade.
How do you account for the resilience of neoconservatives?
They are in it for the long haul; they have been at this for decades. None of these people are going away. They remain energized. This is not a movement that is on its heels. And though the professionalization of the neoconservative movement was in part its undoing as a vibrant intellectual force in American life, the very fact that it has been so institutionalized in Washington guarantees that it will remain an influential force well beyond Iraq.
There is a latent civil war in the Republican Party. There is a realist faction that is not going away. And if you look at conservatives like William F. Buckley, Patrick Buchanan, and George Will, they are all sharply critical of the neoconservative movement. They see neoconservatism as a heretical corruption of true conservative principles, because of big-government spending on the one hand and a utopian foreign policy on the other. But the neoconservatives have become a very powerful faction inside the Republican Party, one that remains on the ascendant.
And let’s face it: The neoconservatives represent a legitimate strain of thinking — interventionism — that’s been around for several centuries and isn’t going away. If the old task was to rescue liberalism from the liberals, the new one is for someone to rescue neoconservatism from the neoconservatives — which is what I think Fukuyama has been trying to do.
What role is neoconservatism playing in the 2008 election?
In my view, it has set out the terrain for the debate: Should the war on terrorism, as Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney declare, be ramped up? Or has it been, as the leading Democrats suggest, a catastrophe that needs to be remedied? There will be no middle ground here, which is the way the neocons like it.
Neoconservative ideas and thinkers suffuse both the McCain and Giuliani campaigns. William Kristol is a longtime friend of McCain’s, and they see eye to eye on the war on terror. Max Boot, Kagan, and Randy Scheunemann, a former director of the Project on the New American Century, are also advising McCain.
As for Giuliani, his most prominent neocon adviser is Podhoretz, whose pugnacious temperament matches Giuliani’s perfectly. They have transported the war for the streets of New York to a war against the rest of the world.
Evan R. Goldstein is a staff editor with The Chronicle Review.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 19, Page B19