Back to crackpot moralism

World Policy Journal, Fall, 2008 by Alan Wolfe

My first contribution to World Policy Journal, "Crackpot Moralism, Neo-Realism, and U.S. Foreign Policy," was published in spring 1986, and explored a seeming paradox in American political life. Figures whose disposition toward the world could only be described as conservative, such as George F. Kennan and Hans Morganthau, had then become critics of American foreign policy, in some cases even identifying with the Left.

Meanwhile, those who called themselves conservative, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, were borrowing the language of democracy promotion and freedom from liberals. I took the side of the former and worried about the potential influence of the latter.

Rereading my essay a quarter century later, I would change two things. First, although I like the term "crackpot moralism," it evokes a bit too much the spirit of C. Wright Mills, the noted sociologist and author of The Power Elite. But in my essay I was trying to say nice things about the thinkers and policymakers whom Mills would have disdained. In addition, I lumped together the former American ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, with other neoconservatives. Having now read Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads (Yale, 2006), I am persuaded that this was unfair to her. In her famous 1979 Commentary article "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Kirkpatrick drew a distinction between totalitarian regimes, which we ought to try and topple, and authoritarian ones, with whom we could find ourselves allied. As Fukuyama sagely points out, her distinction belongs more in the realist camp than the neoconservative one; today, neoconservatives are in favor of toppling authoritarian regimes as well as totalitarian ones.

I do a lot of reviewing, but rarely of my own stuff. So it is hard for me to return to my essay without appearing self-conscious. Having issued the appropriate disclaimer, and assuming before I ever agreed to undertake this task that I would be embarrassed by what I wrote then, I confess to being surprised how well my analysis holds up.

The neoconservatives, I wrote, blinded by an ideological understanding of how the world ought to work, were unable to manage the world as it actually existed. I had Russia, China, and Europe in mind when I wrote that a simplistic division of the world into good and evil would be unable to deal with the actual complexities of global politics. Little did I know that the true test of neoconservative foreign policy would eventually take place in Iraq. George W. Bush, a political unknown when I wrote my essay, gave the neoconservatives far more space to operate than had Ronald Reagan. And now we all know the result: a foreign policy blunder so great that if anything good is ever to come out of it, it will happen only because the realists have once again been put in charge.

Were I to rewrite the essay today, I would add some new wrinkles. For one thing, the kind of romantic adventurism I identified with neoconservatism also came to influence a strand of American liberalism. The run-up to the Iraq venture, after all, had its supporters at the Brookings Institution and in the pages of The New Republic. I will say this for the liberals, however--many of them, including Peter Beinart, Samantha Power, and Michael Ignatieff, eventually changed their minds when the realities of Iraq complicated their insistence that we must intervene against evil regimes. The same cannot be said of Charles Krauthammer or Richard Perle.

Fukuyama, who had once been associated with the neoconservatives, also saw the light of day. But on the right, opposition to the kind of moralistic zealotry I wrote about in 1986 later came primarily from conservatives who were always at odds with the neocons: Andrew Sullivan, the libertarians associated with the Cato Institute, Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, and the paleoconservatives who write for The American Conservative. Back then, the terms "left" and "right" were not making as much sense as they used to, I wrote. That seems even more true today.

In the 1960s I had flirted with the New Left and saw among its adherents, I later came to realize, all too much ideological posturing and political irresponsibility. Moving a bit toward the center--I was never tempted to move much further right than that--I began to see among some of my generation the same kind of moralizing politics that had disturbed me, but this time on the other end of the political spectrum.

One of the subthemes of my essay was that conditions in the world required a more complex understanding of global affairs than the United States traditionally witnesses, but the conditions of American domestic politics gave special advantage to those who made foreign policy seem like a simple matter of punishing the bad guys and rewarding the good ones. Optimistic, I saw the possibility that Americans would learn to see through some of the rhetoric and elect politicians who would not subject them to the temptations of demagoguery.