Kill this word: poor, abused, unrecognizable, meaningless 'neocon'

National Review, April 2, 2007 by Jonah Goldberg

I WAS recently listening to a BBC radio program called World Have Your Say. A fascinating example of globalization at work, it's a worldwide call-in show where the global IQ regresses to the mean and keeps regressing. From every corner of the globe, Michael Moore--style liberals convene like a reunion of resistance members to bemoan the global hegemony of George W. Bush. It's reassuring to know that the French and Balinese can get together like old ladies around the global village well to chit-chat and agree on so much.

Anyway, on the segment I heard, a caller from Ohio with an oddly British accent explained that Hillary Clinton was too conservative to get the Democratic nomination or some such. His proof consisted largely of the fact that she was long associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. He went on to explain, like an Oxford don explaining the pluperfect tense in some dead language, that the DLC is a "neoconservative" institution. And by neoconservative, he meant (I'm quoting from memory) "believing America has a sacred right to hydrocarbons, wherever it might find them around the globe."

Now, while it's impossible to know for sure, it certainly seemed that the remark was received by the global Greek chorus as unremarkable, even insightful and thoughtful. What I can report for sure is that nobody said, "Put down the crack pipe."

By this point, of course, it should hardly be shocking that there is a widespread conviction that neoconservatism is the ideology of All Bad Things. One need only turn on the TV or stray just a few inches off the lighted path and into the darker alleys and unseemly neighborhoods of the Internet to discover whole cosmologies grounded on the granite metaphysical fact that neoconservatives are the dark priests of the profane, the cruel, and the greedy. It is a given that neocon means fascist, or crypto-fascist, or "Straussian" (which is merely German-Jewish for "fascist").

And while we will gingerly sidestep this buffoonery like a steaming pile in a pasture, there is at least one sense in which neoconservatism and fascism are linked. In 1946, George Orwell famously wrote that "the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'" And this, ultimately, seems to be the single reliable definition of neoconservatism for anybody trying to decipher what passes for news and analysis in today's papers and magazines.

For example, Time magazine's Michael Duffy recently reported that the "surge" in Iraq is the "latest salvo in the 30-year tong war between the two big foreign-policy factions in the Republican party: the internationalists and the neoconservatives." If neoconservatism (at least its foreign-policy strain) is something other than "internationalist" I have no idea what that could be. The sentence makes as much sense as saying that the two big factions in the Republican party are carbon-based life forms and neoconservatives. Indeed, for more than 30 years the gripe against neoconservatives has been that they are too internationalist, if by internationalist you mean something wacky like "concerned with international affairs" or "interested in engaging global politics" or, if you must, "defending Israel."

In older, saner times, people writing about foreign-policy factions in the Republican party spoke of at least three schools: realists, isolationists, and neoconservatives. The neocons were the most internationalist, which was just one reason that Russell Kirk denounced their "fanciful democratic globalism." It was the realists, by the way, who were most concerned about maintaining the oil supply, though phrases like "sacred rights" didn't usually trip off Kissingerian tongues. In 1992, when Joshua Muravchik, Ben Wattenberg (my old boss), and other prominent neoconservatives endorsed Bill Clinton, their statement (published in the New York Times) noted that Clinton "understood that this is a time when American leadership can give new energy and purpose to traditional alliances ... such as ... NATO ... [and] can forge closer cooperation . . . with emerging powers, such as Japan." No internationalists to see here, folks.

In a sense the source of this confusion isn't simply the thumbless grasp so many have about the meaning of neoconservatism but the more profound confusion about what anything means at all. By way of explanation, it's worth noting here that the famous Orwell quote continues: "The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another." In other words, it becomes easy to say that neoconservatives are something other than "internationalists" if internationalist has no useful meaning other than "not neoconservative"--i.e., "not evil."

Now, let me be clear: I come here not to praise neoconservatism, but to bury it. We could rehearse all the arguments about what neoconservatism is or isn't, was or wasn't, and it would not change a thing. It doesn't matter that "neoconservative" was originally used--pejoratively--to describe people who moved from left to right. It doesn't matter that Bill Kristol, the most infamous neocon in America today, was never a leftist at all, and that when he put pen to paper to explain his foreign policy, he explicitly called it something other than "neoconservative" ("neo-Reaganite," if you're curious). It doesn't matter that if your definition of neoconservatism involves former Communists who became military or anti-Communist hawks, then NATIONAL REVIEW was a nest of neoconservatism when Commentary was still a New Left journal commissioning pieces from James Baldwin.