The sunset years of the neocons - future of neoconservatism

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 13, 1993 | by Michael Rust

Its been two decades since socialist writer Michael Harrington slapped a label on a group of dissident writers and scholars who were challenging Great Society liberalism. The newly christened "neoconservatives" weren't happy with the name -- but it stuck.

"I've never been comfortable with it," says Richard John Neuhaus, "but you can't choose what you're called." Norman Podhoretz says he would have preferred "neo-nationalists," since defending America's "fundamental institutions and values" was the group's raison d'etre. About the only one happy with the name was Irving Kristol, who once said that, having been named Irving, he was "indifferent to baptismal caprice."

By whatever nomenclature, this relatively small bunch of writers, editors and scholars has had a great influence on policy debate. Long before multiculturalism and health care reform became fashionable, neoconservatives were dissenting from liberal orthodoxy on such issues as affirmative action and welfare reform. In the 1970s, they fought what Podhoretz called "the culture of appeasement" and laid the groundwork for much of the Reagan administration's foreign policy initiatives.

During the halcyon days of the Reagan administration, neocons such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, ambassador to the United Nations during Reagan's first term, provided the intellectual underpinnings for the arms buildup that brought about the collapse of what they called, without hesitation, the Evil Empire. Others, such as William Bennett, education secretary from 1985 to 1988, moved the nation toward a conservative domestic agenda and helped establish a network of neocon foundations and think tanks.

Through it all, they took on their political and philosophical enemies in books and magazines--a lot of magazines. "Don't underestimate magazines," says Kristol, who cofounded the Public Interest and its foreign policy sister, the National Interest, because thoughts and policies first expressed in journals have changed the world.

And the world has changed rapidly. The Soviet Union is gone, Palestinians and Israelis are shaking hands, and the White House is occupied by Bill Clinton, who during his antiwar activist days was the sort of student who turned liberal professors toward neoconservatism. As the original neocons head toward their dotage, some wonder if the group once described by Esquire as "the most important intellectual movement" in the country will become a concern of historians rather than polemicists.

"They're still very much among the living." says Gary Dorrien, author of The Neoconservative Mind and a professor of religion at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. According to Dorrien, neoconservatives remain at the forefront of policy debate for two reasons. First, their support for "exporting democracy" is the main foreign policy alternative to "this confused muddle of realpolitik that everyone else is awash in now." Second, their renewed vigor in fighting "what they would call the cultural war is another vital life sign." While it is unlikely that neocons will regain the political influence they enjoyed in the 1980s, they are a "potent intellectual movement" in American politics, he says.

Initially, neoconservatism was, in the most basic sense of the word, a politics of reaction-- an impassioned response to the failures and excesses of liberalism, the milieu from which most neocons came. Christopher Hitchens, a Vanity Fair columnist and left-wing journalist, describes neoconservatism as the last flowering of New York intellectualism, a movement of a sometimes brilliant, always contentious collection of urban literati who clustered around magazines such as Partisan Review, the New Leader and Dissent in the 1940s and 1950s. Real neocons had to meet certain criteria, one of which was having been an ex-Marxist, "usually an ex-Trotskyist," says Hitchens.

Indeed, philosophical infighting was "wonderful intellectual training," says Kristol, recalling the era when Leon Trotsky and John Dewey debated in the pages of the New International. Querulous by nature, an instinct exacerbated by a tradition that elevated intellectual disagreement into a blood sport, neocons engaged in exuberant, often acerbic debate about politics and culture. Even today, New York writer Paul Berman calls them the last believers in the power of ideas --"the conviction that if you can get the analysis of society straight, you'll accomplish great things."

"Spiritually, they are people of the left," says Justin Raimondo, author of Reclaiming the American Right and a libertarian who concurs that the neocons' youthful leftism has shaped their attitudes to this day. "That's why they are for a conservative welfare state." In the sixties, however, the heresy of the neocons proved traumatic for some segments of what later would be labeled the cultural elite. "There was such shock in New York intellectual circles at the existence of such people, former liberals, former leftists, who used their skills -- in writing, editing, polemics -- against them," remembers Kristol.