Who were the Neoconservatives?
Neoconservatism now seems to have run its course as an ideology, but in its brief life it was enormously influential. It has been often criticised and critiqued, but very few people seem to move beyond a caricature of its intellectual origins. At the same time, it is worth asking if the term ever referred to any clear idea or was merely expressive of a congeries of aggression, fear, post-soviet confidence in liberal democracy, and liberal theories of human perfectibility mixed with a mad distrust of human groups.
There were several other elements to it too. One was a justified anxiety on the part of corporate elites and those who sympathise with them that oil may be running out and climate shifting in ways that, when coupled with population explosion, society could not cope with. Another was the rise of moral relativism; many who viewed themselves as exclusively moral were appalled by this development. Some became neocons. Many of the neocons were, if not self-made because of their association with academic institutions, the children of those who worked physically for a living. A few were, and its no shameful thing since so many have been, misled by Plato's Republic and its tendency to make intellectuals suspicious of the people and proud of the 'noble lie'. Some looked at the answer when they asked 'what does the west actually make now?' and were appalled at the insubstantiality of tertiary industry. But one defining feature that stood out was the contempt of neoconservatives for those who opposed them.
This contempt spoke to the need of those who embraced the new belief when they had abandoned marxism, but had to condemn their former faith. If one thinks that one was on the wrong side of history, and that a clear moral and logical analysis is available to show that what one sympathised with was debased, perverted or impossible, it is hard to understand those who nevertheless cling to it.
This is particularly true if one's opponents do so with a lack of intellectual rigour, wilful ignorance, or an apparent rejection of what seems to the apostate obvious. Very often the response of normal people to the screaming left and the silky communist or liberal appeaser is to acquire a fit of the murderous 'heebie-jeebies'. Lots on the left are a parody of themselves, and blind to the flaws and faults of human beings. It is also one of the curious facts of western life that those who preach the dignity, worth and value of human beings and the importance of freedom are very often the most disputatious, factional and bitter of in-fighters and easy haters. Not always. But often. One does not have to think of one of those desert Christian councils in the Roman time that ended in a fight (many did) or a socialist worker meeting that only unites around splitting and spitting to see that.
There was more. The idea of the state of Israel is one of the most noble ever embraced; a homeland for a persecuted people, an establishment of democracy in the eastern mediterranean alongside Lebanon, a place where jews need not be afraid. It has come under hideous and sustained bombardment and been attacked multiple times.
But this does not mean that Israel in its modern form, driven half mad by siege and containing groups whose refusal long ago to countenance a two-state solution or an entente with palestinians, is always right and it does not mean that Arabs or muslims are always wrong. Into this, the appearance of perfidy and lunacy which the neoconservatives were so quick to glean on the surface of middle eastern politics became very dangerous. They saw horrific car bombs and corruption and outrages, but nothing else. They took some but not all evidence and applied it to a hideously complex and different sort of civilisation.
Look at how iran was defined collectively and as the epitome of insanity because of governments and imams. The government of Iran is a theocratic and nationalist mix of revolution and persian machtpolitik; but this no more means that gentle and civilised cultures and people within Persia and all its multiple identities and groups are any worse or better than the Chinese. Who would dream of getting a war up against them, or holding them in contempt? And if we had the confidence of our culture, why would we not enmesh them in trade, in argument, and at worst in unspoken threat rather than in clumsy intimidation and hypocritical oil-grabs?
The west, or its elites and intellectuals, or specifically neoconservatives, make a western assumption that leads them to trouble. It is that they and their society function just as we do; that all the wires and lines of power lead from the mind to perceived reality and action in the same way. That is to say, there is a very good case for noting that Hitler would not have been possible without the support, tacit or agreed, of the vast bulk of the german people. There were good Germans, but they were not evidenced by their mobbing the streets with the exception the White Rose league of the immortal Hans and Sophie Scholl (and even they were young and naive). But just because that was true in germany doesn't mean exactly the same thing is true of Iran.
For most of Western history, sufferance, toleration or engagement has been the norm, and forces of reform, change and toleration have been minorities who have won out because of economic and military pressure on their regimes from outside. Even the Soviet Union, and Japan after its Meiji regeneration in western form, fall into this camp. But that enlightenment and nineteenth century view of how things work isn't necessarily true of the rest of the world.
In the horrible dark, the suspicion arises in the western mind that only the nuclear bomb would have stopped the Japanese, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary because, as with germany, almost everyone was given over to their regimes. For japan, read Iran or the Arab world in some people's minds. When Ann Coulter said, after the second world trade centre attacks in 2001, that 'we' should 'bomb their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them all to Christianity' she was tapping into a very old western way of thinking.
But is there any evidence that this model applies to the middle east? It is so terribly easy to accept the central necessary myth of social science, that all people are equal and that the situation of all people can be uncovered with reference to definable social rules, psychology, economics and ab initio principles. How true is that of cultures that did not aggressively westernise? that never industrialised? That never experienced the renaissance, let alone the enlightenment, but that did experience colonialism? How does this apply to civilisations that based themselves on values thousands of years older than those in the west, or that are communal, essentially local, and religious in a way that people who spend their lives seeing no good in religion would ever understand?
There is one more initial observation that I wanted to make. It is that the starting point for any argument based around what other people were like or what they would do must be humility. It must involve the understanding that to take a life is to end a world. The neoconservatives have often righteously attacked the nostrums, dementias and aggression, as well as the oppression, that they identify in the rest of the world. They have talked easily of using the immense military technology of the west, and specifically the United States, to end problems. They have built up the ramblings and unfocussed hatred of madmen and criminals like Usama Bin Laden and have taken them as menaces more seriously than the collateral damage 'action' against them implies.
This is the final link to the neoconservative past; to the radical centre identified by arthur schlesinger in the depths of the cold war. The hawks of the left wanted to confront communism wherever they found it; they determined never to back down and never to seek a long, slow painful compromise or quarantine, and to prove themselves footsoldiers of freedom (from their desks and armchairs). They led to Vietnam, and to the Cuban Missile crisis when the world almost died.
Of course,you may object. Some say a conflict in Vietnam and a confrontation with Castro, who wanted to launch the missiles may have been necessary given the language and reality of the cold war. But it is to president Kennedy's immense credit that he realised the folly of such language, shifted to clandestine, peaceful, and space competition, and then reached out in a slow painful way to those who may have wanted to do better than confrontation in the other side. His American University speech of the summer of 1963-- 'America will never start a war'--is one of the great state papers of the twentieth century, and his mooted offer of a place to the soviets on the moon rockets a sliver of possibility unfilled from a world lost when he was shot.
One could take a different tack; his low-energy clandestine opposition to socialists in the third world and his public inspirational rhetoric didn't always match. But it was the public rhetoric that made him memorable and worthwhile. The private schemes, spying and assassination plots, particularly against Castro, just got him killed.
As then, so now. The other side was flabby, and resentful, and boastful, and could not compete. So make them run, make them compete, and do so with patience and avoiding killing when unncessary; how much less reckless was that than the policy that emerged after kennedy's death of just forcing the other side into an arms race? They thought they were morally superior? Let them see if their stakhanovite work practices sparked or blunted against microwave ovens, television and porn. Why is this not true for Iran? The neoconservatives claim that Ronald Reagan won the cold war by bankrupting the Soviets; but what if detente and the Helsinki human rights accords did it first? What if standing firm at Munich in 1938 and trading so as to encourage merchants and weaken Hitler's regime would have done for him and his evil gang and avoided the disaster of the good war of 1939-45, for war is always a disaster? Would this historical analysis ever have given rise to neoconservatives?
The neoconservatives emerged out of the white male mind. They traded in truth, and made it partial, hard, and self-righteous; and they built up charlatans, criminals and the dregs of the earth as the great enemies of mankind. they called the holocaust and the rhineland to their cause, and demonised all religion. They operated in contempt of those with whom they perhaps had a right to be angry on the left, and of every easy self indulgent thing contemplated in western society in recent years. They added to this the fury of ex-marxists and of social scientists who began to apprehend that their ideas might be wrong. And they are still trying to pick a war with a civilisation even the Romans had trouble with as the planet warms and the atom proliferates. Good grief--who were these people?
Neoconservatism now seems to have run its course as an ideology, but in its brief life it was enormously influential. It has been often criticised and critiqued, but very few people seem to move beyond a caricature of its intellectual origins. At the same time, it is worth asking if the term ever referred to any clear idea or was merely expressive of a congeries of aggression, fear, post-soviet confidence in liberal democracy, and liberal theories of human perfectibility mixed with a mad distrust of human groups.
There were several other elements to it too. One was a justified anxiety on the part of corporate elites and those who sympathise with them that oil may be running out and climate shifting in ways that, when coupled with population explosion, society could not cope with. Another was the rise of moral relativism; many who viewed themselves as exclusively moral were appalled by this development. Some became neocons. Many of the neocons were, if not self-made because of their association with academic institutions, the children of those who worked physically for a living. A few were, and its no shameful thing since so many have been, misled by Plato's Republic and its tendency to make intellectuals suspicious of the people and proud of the 'noble lie'. Some looked at the answer when they asked 'what does the west actually make now?' and were appalled at the insubstantiality of tertiary industry. But one defining feature that stood out was the contempt of neoconservatives for those who opposed them.
This contempt spoke to the need of those who embraced the new belief when they had abandoned marxism, but had to condemn their former faith. If one thinks that one was on the wrong side of history, and that a clear moral and logical analysis is available to show that what one sympathised with was debased, perverted or impossible, it is hard to understand those who nevertheless cling to it.
This is particularly true if one's opponents do so with a lack of intellectual rigour, wilful ignorance, or an apparent rejection of what seems to the apostate obvious. Very often the response of normal people to the screaming left and the silky communist or liberal appeaser is to acquire a fit of the murderous 'heebie-jeebies'. Lots on the left are a parody of themselves, and blind to the flaws and faults of human beings. It is also one of the curious facts of western life that those who preach the dignity, worth and value of human beings and the importance of freedom are very often the most disputatious, factional and bitter of in-fighters and easy haters. Not always. But often. One does not have to think of one of those desert Christian councils in the Roman time that ended in a fight (many did) or a socialist worker meeting that only unites around splitting and spitting to see that.
There was more. The idea of the state of Israel is one of the most noble ever embraced; a homeland for a persecuted people, an establishment of democracy in the eastern mediterranean alongside Lebanon, a place where jews need not be afraid. It has come under hideous and sustained bombardment and been attacked multiple times.
But this does not mean that Israel in its modern form, driven half mad by siege and containing groups whose refusal long ago to countenance a two-state solution or an entente with palestinians, is always right and it does not mean that Arabs or muslims are always wrong. Into this, the appearance of perfidy and lunacy which the neoconservatives were so quick to glean on the surface of middle eastern politics became very dangerous. They saw horrific car bombs and corruption and outrages, but nothing else. They took some but not all evidence and applied it to a hideously complex and different sort of civilisation.
Look at how iran was defined collectively and as the epitome of insanity because of governments and imams. The government of Iran is a theocratic and nationalist mix of revolution and persian machtpolitik; but this no more means that gentle and civilised cultures and people within Persia and all its multiple identities and groups are any worse or better than the Chinese. Who would dream of getting a war up against them, or holding them in contempt? And if we had the confidence of our culture, why would we not enmesh them in trade, in argument, and at worst in unspoken threat rather than in clumsy intimidation and hypocritical oil-grabs?
The west, or its elites and intellectuals, or specifically neoconservatives, make a western assumption that leads them to trouble. It is that they and their society function just as we do; that all the wires and lines of power lead from the mind to perceived reality and action in the same way. That is to say, there is a very good case for noting that Hitler would not have been possible without the support, tacit or agreed, of the vast bulk of the german people. There were good Germans, but they were not evidenced by their mobbing the streets with the exception the White Rose league of the immortal Hans and Sophie Scholl (and even they were young and naive). But just because that was true in germany doesn't mean exactly the same thing is true of Iran.
For most of Western history, sufferance, toleration or engagement has been the norm, and forces of reform, change and toleration have been minorities who have won out because of economic and military pressure on their regimes from outside. Even the Soviet Union, and Japan after its Meiji regeneration in western form, fall into this camp. But that enlightenment and nineteenth century view of how things work isn't necessarily true of the rest of the world.
In the horrible dark, the suspicion arises in the western mind that only the nuclear bomb would have stopped the Japanese, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary because, as with germany, almost everyone was given over to their regimes. For japan, read Iran or the Arab world in some people's minds. When Ann Coulter said, after the second world trade centre attacks in 2001, that 'we' should 'bomb their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them all to Christianity' she was tapping into a very old western way of thinking.
But is there any evidence that this model applies to the middle east? It is so terribly easy to accept the central necessary myth of social science, that all people are equal and that the situation of all people can be uncovered with reference to definable social rules, psychology, economics and ab initio principles. How true is that of cultures that did not aggressively westernise? that never industrialised? That never experienced the renaissance, let alone the enlightenment, but that did experience colonialism? How does this apply to civilisations that based themselves on values thousands of years older than those in the west, or that are communal, essentially local, and religious in a way that people who spend their lives seeing no good in religion would ever understand?
There is one more initial observation that I wanted to make. It is that the starting point for any argument based around what other people were like or what they would do must be humility. It must involve the understanding that to take a life is to end a world. The neoconservatives have often righteously attacked the nostrums, dementias and aggression, as well as the oppression, that they identify in the rest of the world. They have talked easily of using the immense military technology of the west, and specifically the United States, to end problems. They have built up the ramblings and unfocussed hatred of madmen and criminals like Usama Bin Laden and have taken them as menaces more seriously than the collateral damage 'action' against them implies.
This is the final link to the neoconservative past; to the radical centre identified by arthur schlesinger in the depths of the cold war. The hawks of the left wanted to confront communism wherever they found it; they determined never to back down and never to seek a long, slow painful compromise or quarantine, and to prove themselves footsoldiers of freedom (from their desks and armchairs). They led to Vietnam, and to the Cuban Missile crisis when the world almost died.
Of course,you may object. Some say a conflict in Vietnam and a confrontation with Castro, who wanted to launch the missiles may have been necessary given the language and reality of the cold war. But it is to president Kennedy's immense credit that he realised the folly of such language, shifted to clandestine, peaceful, and space competition, and then reached out in a slow painful way to those who may have wanted to do better than confrontation in the other side. His American University speech of the summer of 1963-- 'America will never start a war'--is one of the great state papers of the twentieth century, and his mooted offer of a place to the soviets on the moon rockets a sliver of possibility unfilled from a world lost when he was shot.
One could take a different tack; his low-energy clandestine opposition to socialists in the third world and his public inspirational rhetoric didn't always match. But it was the public rhetoric that made him memorable and worthwhile. The private schemes, spying and assassination plots, particularly against Castro, just got him killed.
As then, so now. The other side was flabby, and resentful, and boastful, and could not compete. So make them run, make them compete, and do so with patience and avoiding killing when unncessary; how much less reckless was that than the policy that emerged after kennedy's death of just forcing the other side into an arms race? They thought they were morally superior? Let them see if their stakhanovite work practices sparked or blunted against microwave ovens, television and porn. Why is this not true for Iran? The neoconservatives claim that Ronald Reagan won the cold war by bankrupting the Soviets; but what if detente and the Helsinki human rights accords did it first? What if standing firm at Munich in 1938 and trading so as to encourage merchants and weaken Hitler's regime would have done for him and his evil gang and avoided the disaster of the good war of 1939-45, for war is always a disaster? Would this historical analysis ever have given rise to neoconservatives?
The neoconservatives emerged out of the white male mind. They traded in truth, and made it partial, hard, and self-righteous; and they built up charlatans, criminals and the dregs of the earth as the great enemies of mankind. they called the holocaust and the rhineland to their cause, and demonised all religion. They operated in contempt of those with whom they perhaps had a right to be angry on the left, and of every easy self indulgent thing contemplated in western society in recent years. They added to this the fury of ex-marxists and of social scientists who began to apprehend that their ideas might be wrong. And they are still trying to pick a war with a civilisation even the Romans had trouble with as the planet warms and the atom proliferates. Good grief--who were these people?
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