A (Public) Choice, Not an Echo
(posted by Jim Henley)
One of my favorite political thinkers, Daniel Koffler, makes an interesting argument about the practical politics of Bill Kristol’s claim of minimal foreign-policy differences between Obama and McCain that is, I think, probably wrong:
The likelihood is that John McCain will lose; if and when he loses, the multilateral truce among neos, paleos, reformists, and GOP hacks — which is about as fragile as the truce in Basra to begin with — is going to shatter before Obama’s victory speech ends.
The neocons are in a decidedly weak position. Fairly or not, it’s their foreign policy more than anything else that has made the name of the GOP radioactive — and even worse for Republican partisans, has destroyed the party’s nearly 40-year-old, frequently decisive advantage on national security. And though the Republicans somehow stumbled into nominating their only candidate with a prayer of victory, they exposed the neocons to even more risk by choosing, in John McCain, the most prominent exponent of their philosophy in American politics. Honest neocons like Lawrence Kaplan readily concede that neoconservatism’s future rests on McCain’s shoulders. Kristol, on the other hand, is trying to reframe the debate to obscure its ramifications for his ideology in case McCain loses.
Where this goes wrong politically is, no matter who wins the election, so-called neoconservatives will probably remain the prime movers of Republican foreign policy for the foreseeable future.
- They are the energized constituency within the Party. They care more about foreign policy than any other component except a slice of the paleos.
- Neoconservatives have prominent media platforms that are useful to the GOP as a whole.
- Neoconservatism is useful to important elements of the GOP coalition. It implies spiraling increases to military spending. It is a coherent nationalism for the nationalist party to embrace. It provides a ready-made critique of the domestic political opposition (”appeasers!”).
- The “stab-in-the-back” narrative is a perfect example of the kind of magical thinking that explains away failure. The rituals didn’t fail us, we failed the rituals! This has worked for thousands of years. As sure as shooting, bad things will happen around the globe during an Obama administration. An Obama administration may even - gasp! - err in response to a crisis. The beauty of neoconservative ideology is that there is always some war that could, theoretically, have been launched at some point that didn’t get fought, and it will always be possible to claim that “if only” America had had the “will and imagination” to kill just those extra few foreigners, everything would have turned out different and better.
- Neoconservatives play well with others. Neoconservatives have been willing to accede to or even advocate the fiscal goals of the rent-seeking element of the GOP and the social goals of the evangelicals. It’s important to remember that first-generation neoconservatism was conservatism: the neocons shared the extant right-wing concerns about crime; the relationship of dependency to the welfare state; “bending over backwards” to ameliorate racism; changing family patterns. For every PJ O’Rourke-style Republican Party Reptile who merely wanted to cut taxes and “Give War a Chance,” there was a Norman Podhoretz or Daniel Patrick Moynihan concerned that “the blacks” were literally on their way to becoming a separate species.
- Evangelicals and paleocons are not an identity. The nationalist self-satisfaction of neoconservatism - American hegemony is morally good - fits mainstream evangelicalism’s view of (Judeo-)Christian America as anointed by God. (And, of course, at war with Islam.)
- Paleoconservatism does not play well with others. Its foreign policy does not lead to high defense budgets. Its immigration policy does not maximize cheap labor. Its preference for localism can foster hostility to agribusiness and large retailers. It will continue to be at a disadvantage in intra-party disputes on practically any topic, including foreign affairs, war and internal security prerogatives.
Simply put, outside of anti-Semitic fantasies, small groups of mostly Jewish intellectuals don’t bamboozle large Gentile institutions - and the Republican Party is nothing if not a large Gentile institution - into betraying their own perceived best interests. So-called neoconservatism became, by mid-decade, simply Republican foreign policy. The base assumptions of the GOP base and elite just are neoconservative. And that happened because the ideology of neoconservatism served Republican-Party interests and accorded with preexisting Republican-Party proclivities.
The question is whether one possible electoral defeat this year changes those interests significantly. My inclination is, no. Every country is going to have a nationalist party. This particular country’s nationalist party is still going to want to justify massive defense budgets, flatter the nation about its righteousness and paint its opponents as “on the other side.” Paleo-ism cuts against too many of those interests. The so-called Realists don’t inspire passion. Too many other rationales for an American nationalist party - from immigration to homophobia - are demographically doomed. So-called Neoconservatism is much more of a unifying factor than a source of division for the GOP and likely to remain so.
POSTSCRIPT: The separate question is whether Kristol was factually correct in his assessment of McCain’s and Obama’s foreign policies. See John Schwenkler and Daniel Koffler again.
June 7th, 2008 at 10:49 am
[...] recently, I explain why neoconservatism isn’t going away even if John McCain loses the election, in response to Daniel Koffler. This one is pretty [...]
June 7th, 2008 at 11:29 am
I think this is pretty much dead-on. Especially this:
“Neoconservatives play well with others. Neoconservatives have been willing to accede to or even advocate the fiscal goals of the rent-seeking element of the GOP and the social goals of the evangelicals.”
Another way to look at this is that neoconservatism is something of the One Ring of the Republican coalition. It’s hyperfocus on aggressive foreign policy leaves it unusually devoid of any inherent views on domestic, economic, or social policy. As a result, it is capable of being a uniting presence for an almost limitless combination of interest groups - as long as those interest groups are willing to accept some conception that the United States faces an existential threat. Since the idea of facing existential threats is really, really useful to just about any ideology. In this way, neoconservatives wind up not just being a part of the horse-trading that creates and maintains the Republican coalition - it actually acts as the force behind which all the elements of the coalition can unite.
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”
The only problem with neo-conservatism as a unifying, dominant philosophy is that its ability to rule, find, bring, and bind coalition members is greatly reduced when there is no conceivable foreign “threat” to the American (as defined by then-existing GOP coalition members) way of life.
I could probably find more ways to draw absolutely terrible analogies between neo-conservatism and the One Ring, but I have a crying baby to get to…..
June 7th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Neoconservatives play well with others.
As well, neocons play well with others from the putative other side, while paleos often don’t. There is an FP establishment, and, of late, it is probably best characterized as neoliberal. (And of the two strains of neoliberalism, the preferred one appears (or appeared) to be TNR neoliberalism.) Neocons are at least facially OK with a couple of touchstones of Dems and neolibs: the right side won the civil rights wars of the sixties, and antisemitism is bad. Rightly or wrongly, paleos have a reputation for having problems in just such areas. So there’s no forceful opposition to neocons as neocons from the Democratic side. Contrast that with various paleos: it doesn’t happen all of the time, but in many discussions of any Bucchanan position, his broad xenophobia gets pulled in whether or not it is strictly relevant. If you have to pick between two advocates, one that you think is smart and one that the judge thinks is smart, you pick the latter. Republicans like neocons in part because they get a better hearing in various forums that include Democrats.
June 7th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I agree neoconservatism isn’t going away. Neocons are very adept at re-packaging themselves to fit the situation.
The only thing they really seem to care that much about is foreign policy. This makes them the eternal friends of the military-industrial complex and the jingoists. They are more than happy to capitulate to the economic interests of big capital (even though many of the neocons are former socialists). And my guess it that they’ll be able to tame the Left eventually by capitulating on abortion, gay marriage, environmentalism, affirmative action and other liberal sacred cows. For instance, I find it very interesting that a mentally unstable warmonger like McCain is actually considered a moderate while an antiwar but socially conservative thinker like Pat Buchanan is considered an extremist.
June 7th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
My (now co-worker) Anthony Gregory says that the neo-conservatives are ultra conservative, very much in line with the essence of conservatism. He draws this, I suspect, from Rothbard’s thinking during his time on the left.
But if you look at neo-conservative positions vis-a-vis the paleos (libertarian and conservative, but mostly the latter) they are clearly more liberal on social and domestic issues. Abortion and immigration, come to mind. There was an analysis of these positions by a paleo critic when the New York Times hired Kristol.
If granting power to the state, especially its military apparatus, is the only variable with which to decide upon the designation of “liberal” or “conservative”, then indeed the neo-cons are super conservative. But why is foreign policy and the military industrial complex necessarily the most salient issue for this purpose?
Radical (the “right wing” version being “extremist”) decentralization and fawning for an agrarian, communitarian lifestyle is, face it, reactionary. I don’t much care for being on the side of “progress” per se, but let’s just be clear about this stuff.
June 7th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
As the US economy continues to go down due to trade deficits, fiscal extravagance, accumulated debt, rising fuel costs, the falling dollar, yadda, yadda, I think the real source of political division in the US in the future is going to be matters of class as it is in most Latin American and Middle Eastern societies, and as it was in Europe prior to the mid-20th century.
The emerging US ruling class is both jingoist, imperialist, corporatist and state-capitalist as well as cosmopolitan, internationalist, modernist, “multiculturalist”, etc. in nature. I think this more similar to Jacobinism, Communism, and other left-totalitarian ideologies than any kind of conservatism. Keep in mind that French Jacobinism was more or less a synthesis of liberal-universalism, centralist state-nationalism, and bourgeoisism. That describes the neocons almost perfectly.
Conservatism is rooted in an affinity for “throne and altar” traditionalism or communitarian particularism. As Dain says, these are reactionary positions, but neocons are steadfastly opposed to them.
Look for opposition movements to emerge in the future in the US that come from all over the place but have class as a common denominator. For instance, the militiamen of the 90s were more or less just a modern American version of a peasant rebellion. The LA riots were a de facto insurrection by the lumpenproletariat so despised by both bourgeoisie and Marxists alike. The “eco-terrorist” types are more or less the modern Luddites. The anarchist youth gangs that were into rioting at WTO conferences a few years back came from the standard lumpen youth, bohemians and declasse students and intellectuals that you might have found in Paris ‘68.
June 7th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Social Democrats, USA
Copyright: 1996, SD, USA
Kristol described the current Republican coalition as consisting primarily of two main strains: economic and social conservatives. The economic conservatives are anti-state and the social conservatives are anti-liberal who view liberalism “as corroding and subverting the virtues that they believe must be the bedrock of decent society.” He believes that the differences between the economic conservatives and the social conservatives produce “tensions” between the two groups. Kristol’s long range view is that the social conservatives represent “an authentic mass movement that gathers strength with every passing year.”
from:
Splitting the Republican Coalition
—————————————————————–
This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his “The Man Versus the State,” was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today’s America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.
from:
The Neoconservative Persuasion
—————————————————————–
In his foreword to the first paperback edition of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978), sociologist Daniel Bell announced that he was “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” People “might find this statement puzzling,” Bell went on, “assuming that if a person is radical in one realm, he is radical in all others; and, conversely, if he is a conservative in one realm, that he must be conservative in the others as well. Such an assumption misreads, both sociologically and morally, the nature of these different realms.”1
From:
Disjoining the Left: Cultural Contradictions of Anticapitalism
Neocons and Christian Nationalists are typical right-wing statists. They were allowed to hide behind the anti-state rhetoric for decades.
June 7th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Regarding One Ring analogies: Just as the neos can, in the darkness, bind together all the factions, so too would they sacrifice anything to have the Power to bring war on other lands. As noted above, they would flip on any domestic issue just to get in a coalition that will drop bombs on some foreigners.
June 8th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Jim: “Neoconservatives play well with others. Neoconservatives have been willing to accede to or even advocate the fiscal goals of the rent-seeking element of the GOP ”
Jim, I think that your argument is pretty strong; this is one of the few flaws that I can find. It’s been a long, long time since the rent-seeking element of the GOP was not dominant. The last small government GOP president was Hoover. The real libertarian faction within the GOP was against rent-seeking, but the past several years have proven that faction to be either very, very small, not libertarian, or no longer supporters of the GOP.
And, of course, big businesses/-men have been using the GOP for gov’t support, with little problems, for well over a century.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Nicely thought out. I’ll just add something brief, that I think the modern conservative movement and Republican Party are increasingly dominated by racial/national paranoia and tribalism, both domestic and international. It is decreasingly governed by rational elements, and more by amygdala-based emotion and fear (the “lizard brain”).
I think much of the reason for certain Democrats’ threats of defection to John McCain (even if empty) is rooted in such paranoia, and this may form the new primary fault line of the parties as we move further into the 21st Century. It’s not solely racial/ethnic, either; it is simultaneously nativist and frightened about “invasion” - whether physical or cultural - by “3rd World” foreign countries.
To me, the Republican Party increasingly resembles a fear-locked gated community surrounded on all sides by imagined, swarthy threats lurking in the shadows. In a sense, this is a predictable consequence of a country that has reached the apex of its power, and threatens to tumble down the other side.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
“So-called neoconservatism became, by mid-decade, simply Republican foreign policy. The base assumptions of the GOP base and elite just are neoconservative.”
I got into it with Paul Craig Roberts over this issue a few years ago. He tried to make a sharp distinction between the “bad” neocon foreign policy of the Bush administration, and the previous “good” foreign policy of the Reagan years (Buchanan implicitly makes the same distinction).
I responded that, although the PNAC & Co. may have kicked it up a notch, the whole Pax Americana thing has been a characteristic of the New Right since the 1950s, and was at the heart of Reaganism.
Roberts, in typical abusive form, said I should learn to read if I thought “Reaganism and neoconservatism were the same things.”
June 10th, 2008 at 1:28 am
“Pax Americana thing has been a characteristic of the New Right since the 1950s, and was at the heart of Reaganism”
What’s interesting is that neoconservatism is essentially Wilsonian. The rise of neoconseratism really represents the destruction of the “Old Right” and a split in the progressive movement ( Liberals mugged by reality), with the religious-militarist wing taking over the Republican party.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:31 am
My interpretation of the “New Right” as it emerged in the US in the 1950s is that is was simply the political arm of the military-industrial complex that emerged during WW2 and the early Cold War. John T Flynn predicted that US entry into WW2 would produce a militarized state in the US and that’s exactly what happened.
The intellectuals that founded the “conservative movement” were mostly MIC-CIA stooges such as former CIA man Bill Buckley, ex-Commie-turned-stool pigeon Whitaker Chambers, ex-Commie turned nuke-happy nutjob James Burham, ex-Commie turned pseudo-libertarian “fusionist” Frank Meyer, etc.
The other causes that drove the “conservative movement” like fiscal, economic, social, or religious conservatism were simply red meat for the peasants and a means of generating activists and constituents. Even anti-communism was a cover for US militarism and imperial expansionism.
I do think some distinctions can be made between the New Right-Reaganism and the Neocons. The New Right was less ideological, more about the “national interest” and less concerned with pieties about spreading “democracy”, and lacked the Israel-centric outlook of the Neocons. I see the Neocons as opportunists with their own agenda who formed an alliance of convenience with the New Right. I’d say the New Right is primarily about the economic interests of the right-wing of the ruling class and protecting the empire in general, while the Neocons are about securing positions as court intellectuals for themselves, Jacobinism as an ideological interest and Zionism as an ethno-religious interest.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Patrick, it’s only Wilsonian if you believe what they say. Personally when country A announces an invasion of resource-rich country B for reasons of democracy, freedom, apple pie and such, I look for proof.
June 11th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Barry,
1) Somehow that oil money isn’t going into the coffers of country A. In fact, Country A is losing an awful lot of money on this invasion 2) Country B is actually now a multi-party democracy with fully functional elections.
My take on Iraq is that the main problem is gross incompetence. The US hasn’t been good at imperialism since the end of World War II. The government can’t even pacify Southeast DC, much less a tribal of nation of 30 million people halfway around the world. And the idea of trying to transform a tribal country with no civic institutions ( schools, courts, established press, civil service) into a democracy is idiotic.
June 15th, 2008 at 7:12 am
From what I’ve deduced it appears that the neoconservative movement is a courious fusion of former Trotskyist socialists and pro-Israel/Zionism defense intellectuals such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, “free market” think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, and with support from fervent Christian Zionists due to George Jnrs. convertion in a mid life crisis.
Its mutant mix of New Class superiority complex, fascist totalarianism, and religious populism. There are some interesting articles that I stumbled across that provide some insights of the roots from which neo-conservatism sprouted from.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster91.html
I actually know a fair number of the latter here in New Zealand and you can pretty much determine a person’s political allegiance by asking whether they support the war in Iraq.
Its funny how her in New Zealand theres not the divisions on the right here over the Iraq issue. They’re all in locksteps, whether they’re neoliberals (Straussian neo-cons), paleolibertarians, or Objectivists even. Theres not the political diversity thats apparent in the United States owing I guess to our small size, such as the divison of the Right between geopolitical pragmatists such as Colin Powell and James Baker, Paleocons such as Pat Buchanan, and internationalist neo-cons as the aforemention Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
According to Greg Palast the neocons have actually suffered an internal coup in favour of the realists, because of their incompetent handling of the Iraq situation. Now James Baker famous for being an intermediary between Washington, the Gulf Sheiks, and Saddam Hussein and his unsuccessful attempts at “restructuring” the debts of many nations in Latin America and Africa in the 1980s has been appointed to do the same in Iraq.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4354269.stm
http://tinyurl.com/3jzu4a
Keith Preston,
I agree with your description of the ruling class of the U.S. both of the Left and Right varieties, though I would dispute that the “New Right” arose only subsequent to World War II as it actually predated it in the form of the American Liberty League, which consisted of an eclectic mix of participants among them some of the richest American Industrialists who had considerably profited from Wilson’s intervention in World War I and politicians from across the political spectrum who were opposed to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and many contend that they were involved in a plot to carry out a coup d’at against him so strenuous were their objections.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Liberty_League
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Not to mention the fact that they even describe themselves as “Hard Wilsonians” to distinguish themselves from the “Soft Wilsonians” like Barak Obama, as they’re not concerned with the mutlilateralism and regard for internation agreement before carrying out their objectives.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110002840
June 15th, 2008 at 11:52 am
“From what I’ve deduced it appears that the neoconservative movement is a courious fusion of former Trotskyist socialists and pro-Israel/Zionism defense intellectuals such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, “free market” think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, and with support from fervent Christian Zionists due to George Jnrs. convertion in a mid life crisis.
Its mutant mix of New Class superiority complex, fascist totalarianism, and religious populism.”
Yep.
July 4th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Fascinating analysis. The comments are strong as well. But I have to agree with Koffler’s take on the politics.
“Kristol, on the other hand, is trying to reframe the debate to obscure its ramifications for his ideology in case McCain loses. ”
Absolutely. And as a Republican who was against the war from the start, and will voting for Obama, I’m looking forward with relish to the November disaster and the civil war within the Party. The neocon bubble is about to burst, assuredly as the bubble in oil prices eventually will. (As an aside, when did everyone become oil analysts/futures traders all of a sudden?)
Those of us who are conservatives in the Party (paleo is a redundant suffix) understand the neocons are to blame for the disaster. We know that unless we wish to resign ourselves to permanent minority status, we will need to refashion a new conservative platform. The old debates and factions are exactly that–old.
Consider several points. (I’m willing to concede I don’t know anything, because, well, I don’t.)
(a) anti-Semitism - growing in Europe, growing in America, a dishonorable, powerful, useful stimulant, especially if the populist backlash against Bush’s incompetence continues to grow. Never to be discounted, unfortunately. But politics can be a dirty business, and, well, the stakes are high.
(b) the Wall Street crowd (Northeastern Republicans, Ivy elitists, Rockefeller blah blah blah ) - many of us voting for Obama, can personally attest to this one. I had hoped that the O man would disappoint many liberals and the shrieking left and pleasantly surprise Republicans. He has and will continue to, except on taxes, but we can’t win them all.
(c) populist backlash ties nicely in with nativism, isolationism, American-firsterism (terrible coinage, sorry). This is not necessarily, or at least, does not have to be, anti-corporate.
“It will continue to be at a disadvantage in intra-party disputes on practically any topic, including foreign affairs, war and internal security prerogatives.”
Wishful thinking, sorry.
Corporations will adjust to the situation at hand to make money. High tariffs, high oil prices, weak dollar is starting to mean more manufacturing in the US. Whatever the political situation, the American capitalist will find a way to succeed. That’s his genius and where he gets his power.
(d) The evangelical movement is changing. Greater Israel, global conflict with “Islamo-fascism” whatever is old news. Evangelicals for Human Rights conference on torture the weekend of Sept. 11 this year–that’s the future.
(e) The active and excited base of the Party is Ron Paul’s coalition. There are problems with Paul and the coalition, but these are our Deaniacs–young, passionate, anti-war, anti-abortion, religious, but interested less in cultural issues than things like AIDS, poverty, etc etc. It’s natural for the young to be idealistic, of course, and pro pot smoking, and there aren’t enough of them yet to cobble together a majority, but the change is starting. It’s generational.
The Republican Party kindly asks the neo-Trotskyites go back to the Communist Party where they belong. They’ve done enough damage to the cause of conservatism. They were useful for their time, of course, but, well, things change. (Haven’t you heard?) Thanks for the memories. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.