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The right attitude: over time, the neocons' ideology has morphed. But their temperament has remained fixed
Washington Monthly, Jan-March, 2008 by Kevin Drum
They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons
by Jacob Heilbrunn
Doubleday, 336 pp.
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What is a neocon? Do neocons, in fact, even exist? New York Times columnist David Brooks, who might himself be described as a kind of soft neocon--or is that an oxymoron?--tried his best to make light of the whole idea four years ago in a piece that mocked liberal notions of neocon influence on the Bush administration's foreign policy:
Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day you read that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into Syria ... Every day, it seemed, Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an expose on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators ... The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles.
Later, in the same column Brooks joked that the conspiracy theorists think "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish.'" Or, at least, he said it was a joke later, after critics pounced on him: "I was careful not to say that Bush or neocon critics are anti-Semitic," he backtracked.
As well he should have been. After all, the accusation that neoconservatism is primarily a Jewish phenomenon is a common one because--well, because an awful lot of neocons are Jewish. After all, the roll call of influential contemporary neocons usually starts with Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol and then rolls ponderously through Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Elliott Abrams, and others before finishing up with Charles Krauthammer and Marry Peretz. Not to mention one David Brooks. That's a lot of Jewish names.
But wait! What about Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Patrick Moynihan? Or, among the current crop, Bill Bennett and Michael Novak? They aren't Jewish.
Which brings us to Jacob Heilbrunn and his recently published history of neoconservatism, They Knew They Were Right. Heilbrunn, who is himself Jewish and who once went through his own youthful flirtation with neoconservatism, doesn't shy away from diving directly into this most inflammatory of questions. No, Heilbrunn writes, not all neocons are Jewish, especially today, but there's no question where the roots of neoconservatism lie:
Despite the fervent protestations of its founders and adherents, then, it is anything but an anti-Semitic canard to label neoconservatism a largely Jewish movement. I hope it's clear, however, that I am talking about a cultural proclivity specific to American Jews of a certain generation, not about something that is "essentially" Jewish in either a religious or a racial sense. The best way to understand the phenomenon may be to focus on neoconservatism as an uneasy, controversial, and tempestuous drama of Jewish immigrant assimilation--a very American story. At bottom, it is about an unresolved civil war between a belligerent, upstart ethnic group and a staid, cautious American foreign policy establishment that lost its way after the Vietnam war.
Not everyone will agree with that particular gloss, but the origins of what Norman Podhoretz calls the neoconservative "persuasion" are unquestionably rooted in the Jewish immigrant world of New York City in the 1930s, a story that Heilbrunn lays out in a near blur of detail that, at times unfortunately, characterizes the entire book. It centers on the City College of New York, where Trotskyites dueled obsessively across the cafeteria alcoves with Stalinists about nearly everything: the New Deal, the Spanish civil war, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a thousand arcane points of Marxist theory, and, of course, the future of the world. Always that. And always with no holds barred, no backsliding forgotten, and no allowances given. It was politics as intellectual street fight, where no slight was left unanswered and the only way to deal with an enemy was with a crushing blow.
Not all of these young Trotskyites went on to become neocons. In fact, only a few of them did. But in telling the story of the world in which they grew up, Heilbrunn is doing something more important than recounting dusty disputations between earnest Marxists: he's telling the story of the temperament behind them, a temperament that, in a way, is more important than any of the varying ideologies it has inspired along the way.
Heilbrunn chronicles the neocon temperament with both a historian's eye for the grand narrative and a reporter's eye for the telling detail, and in doing so he deftly exposes both neoconservatism's inherent contradictions as well as its inherent allure. In one revealing passage, for example, Heilbrunn makes clear the primacy of temperament over ideology in these young men (and they were mostly men) whose ideologies later turned out to be both so plastic and so influential. After World War II, with capitalism triumphant and the doctrinal disputes of 1930s-era socialism stale and irrelevant, what happened to these former Trotskyites? "They had always," Heilbrunn says, "been anti-Stalinist. Now, somewhat to their own surprise, they became anticommunists tout court."
