J'Accuse
BY MATT CONTINETTI
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As a result of the war, neoconservatives are suddenly
everywhere. After Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace
prize last year, Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift wrote that “the
same neocons who denigrate Carter’s peace prize look
upon the United Nations as an encumbrance to war.” The
American Prospect’s Robert Dreyfuss labeled Ahmed
Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a
“neocon”: “If T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) had been a 21st-century
neoconservative operative instead of a British
imperial spy, he’d be Ahmed Chalabi's best friend.” The
Washington Monthly’s Joshua Micah Marshall accused
neoconservatives of hoping that conflict in Iraq would
presage a wider, regional Middle East war.
Blaming the war on neoconservatives wasn’t the
exclusive domain of the antiwar Left. Patrick Buchanan
recently created a magazine, The American Conservative,
devoted to fighting conservatives who “relish the
prospect of the coming Pax Americana and ‘cakewalk’ to
Baghdad,” according to a letter Buchanon wrote to The
New Republic last year. “Do you seriously believe,”
Buchanan went on to ask in the letter, “that conservatism
is now wholly encompassed by Norman Podhoretz, Jonah
Goldberg, Ramesh Ponnuru, Rich Lowry, our virtuous
Teletubby William Bennett, Charles Krauthammer, and
the Kristols, p`ere et fils?”
Where did all these neoconservatives come from? And,
more importantly, what is a neoconservative?
As Buchanan’s letter suggests, the recent outbreak of
neoconservatism occurred as the debate over the war
became the dominant issue in American politics. The
label has become shorthand for “pro-war conservative.”
Case in point: of the list of so-called neoconservatives
that Buchanan provided in his letter to The New
Republic, only four — Norman Podhoretz, William
Bennett, Charles Krauthammer, and Kristol p`ere — are
actual, dyed-in-the-wool neoconservatives.
It was “Kristol p`ere” (Irving Kristol), in fact, who
invented the term neoconservative. Kristol had to come up
with a label for the group of liberal intellectuals who
became disillusioned with the New Left in the sixties and
seventies, and who shortly thereafter left the Democratic
party. Neoconservatives were literally “new” conservatives.
At first, neoconservatives didn’t have much to say about
foreign policy. The earliest neoconservatives were more
disenchanted with the War on Poverty of the 1960s than
they were with, say, the war in Vietnam. But a second wave
of neoconservatives left the Democratic party after that
party disgraced Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson.
Jackson was the living embodiment of the liberal interventionist
wing of the Democratic party, a senator who
stood for the projection of American power and the
advancement of liberal democratic institutions throughout
the world. By the late seventies, however, the
Democratic party — which had become accomodationist
toward the Soviet Union and actively supported a nuclear
weapons freeze — had no place for Jackson, and thus had
no place for Jackson’s supporters.
While most neoconservatives were policy wonks, pundits,
and other bookish sorts who haunted op-ed pages and
the mastheads of “little magazines” like Commentary and
The Public Interest — in other words, intellectuals who
had little, if any, influence on policy — there was one neoconservative
whose name you might recognize. He was a
scholar and a life-long Democrat who found himself without
a home in the Democratic party during the course of
the seventies and early eighties, a classic example of a
neoconservative. His name is Paul Wolfowitz, and he is
currently Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Contrary to what antiwar pundits claim, there are no
neoconservatives in Bush’s cabinet — although there are
several at the sub-cabinet level. These include not only
Wolfowitz but Undersecretary for Defense Policy
Douglas Feith and Vice President Cheney’s Chief of
Staff, “Scooter” Libby — who occupy second- or thirdtier
positions in the administration. But that’s it. One of
the most infamous “neocons,” Richard Perle, chairs a
group called the Defense Policy Board, but members of
the Policy Board are not government employees.
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are life-long
Republicans. They are pro-war. But they cannot be
called, with any accuracy, neoconservatives.
If most “neoconservatives” really aren’t neoconservatives
at all, but are rather life-long conservatives or pro-war
Democrats like The New Republic’s Lawrence F. Kaplan
and the Carnegie Endowment’s Robert Kagan, then why is
the label used so often by antiwar writers and activists?
All of us rely on rules of thumb to interpret the vast
array of political information we encounter on a daily
basis. In the same way that “San Francisco Democrat”
has come to mean “crazy liberal” for conservatives,
“neoconservative” has become shorthand for someone
who is pro-war. Such labels have little, if anything, to do
with reality. Just as antiwar activists ignore the history
and ideas of neoconservatives when they call Donald
Rumsfeld a “neocon,” Republicans ignore the motives
and ideas of unreconstructed liberals when they call
Nancy Pelosi a “San Fransisco Democrat.”
Promiscuously used political labels serve as cover for
ignoring the reasoning behind people’s political positions.
Would Robert Dreyfuss know a neoconservative if he met
one on the street? Could radio host Michael Savage, if
pressed, say even a few words about Herbert Croly’s The
Promise of American Life, one of the touchstones of twentieth-
century American liberal thought?
This is the state of American political debate: pundits
play rhetorical games and sling mud over nomenclature
while interaction with the ideas and facts behind opposing
viewpoints is anathematized. Are we rats in a maze
— or people with ideas in our heads?
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Matt Continetti is graduating from Columbia University this
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