The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture and the War of Ideology. - book reviews

Christian Century, Feb 1, 1995 by Elizabeth Mellen

By Gary Dorrien. Temple University Press, 500 pp., $44.95; paperback, $22.95.

NEOCONSERVATIVE arguments are part of the sea of ideas in which we swim. The steady production of neoconservative material--now as much within religious circles as outside them--has provoked irritation, complaint and dismay, as well as admiration and gratitude. There has not been much solid inquiry into neoconservatism's history and characteristic ways of thinking, however. Gary Dorrien's fine book sheds considerable light on the "intellectual movement originated by former leftists that promotes militant anticommunism, capitalist economics, a minimal welfare state, the rule of traditional elites, and a return to traditional cultural values." Dorrien teaches religion, chairs the humanities department and is dean of the chapel at Kalamazoo College. His Reconstructing the Common Good: Theology and the Social Order (1990) explored conceptions of social and economic transformation in writers informed by a religious vision.

When Michael Harrington and the editors of Dissent saw compadres in the civil rights and antiwar movements back off from these movements and turn to the right with the fervor of converts, they dubbed them "neoconservatives." Unlike other conservatives, "neos" did not seek models in "medieval Catholicism, seventeenth century orthodoxy, nineteenth-century capitalism, or the Old South," nor did they locate society's fall from grace in "the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, or the rise of the welfare state." They were modernists, most of them trained in the social sciences. In their view, the root of society's trouble lay in the recent triumph of a "new class."

The book opens with an examination of neoconservatism's roots in the debates on the old left and in arguments between old and new left which took place primarily among "New York Jewish intellectuals" from the 1930s forward, with new permutations in the 1960s. Though today's neoconservatives may hail from different contexts, neoconservatism's fervent antiliberalism, its intense political commitment and strong polemics, its intellectuality and literary productivity and especially its animus against the "new class" derive from these origins.

To account for the Bolshevik revolution's devolution into state socialism in the U.S.S.R., followers of Trotsky theorized that a new bureaucratic class had gained control of the means of production and blocked the development of a state democratically owned and controlled by workers. U.S. political theorist David Bazelon later used the notion of a "new class" to elucidate American politics, suggesting that "liberalism in America was largely a rationalization of New Class managers, lawyers, bureaucrats, social workers, consultants and academics" with an interest in "an ever expanding welfare state, providing meaningful employment and ego gratification." Liberals and conservatives alike were creating a vast bureaucratic state designed "to administer everybody and everything." In Towards a Democratic Left (1968), however, Michael Harrington argued that such an idealistic, educated new professional class, with the experience of the civil rights and antiwar movements under its belt, could become the "conscience constituency" for a new American progressivism. Neoconservatives immediately subjected this progressive new class to class analysis. Putting a new spin on the Trotskyite idea, Michael Novak claimed that this move only masked a liberal elite's drive for power and prestige "under the banner of compassion." Variations on this theme have remained a staple in neoconservative writing.

The Neoconservative Mind is principally devoted to examining the careers and evolving thoughts of four of neoconservatism's leading theorists: Novak, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Peter Berger. Dorrien respects and admires these writers for their political energy and rhetorical skill, for their sometimes telling arguments and critiques of liberalism and for their ability to pinpoint weaknesses and absurdities. He is sensitive to their complaint that they have. not been treated fairly and accurately.

In taking them seriously, Dorrien also takes them on, probing contradictions in their thinking and pointing to ways they have misconstrued other thinkers and ignored or distorted empirical evidence. He shows how their typical concerns divert attention from such matters as homelessness, unemployment, the wreckage in our inner cities, the despoilment of the environment and the outcomes of multinational corporate activity. Dorrien also notes that an appreciative corporate world (via foundations) has substantially rewarded neoconservative; for their defense of capitalist interests. (And Irving Kristol's "godfather" role as conducter of the flow of funds is revealed.)

The book's closing chapter, "Fractured Conservatism," follows neoconservatism into the '90s, observing its conflicted moves in the face of the cold war thaw and the loss of the common bond of anticommunism. The responses to the gulf war evidenced some intramural debate on America's mission to the world. Neoconservatives severed ties with the old right--which retained racist, nativist and isolationist sentiments--and forged new alliances with the burgeoning Religious Right, jettisoning some of their snobbishness along the way. They moved into the "culture wars" against feminism, affirmative action, multiculturalisin and environmentalism.