|
The End of The New
Republic When I called May to learn his policy prescription
for Iran, he provided a surprising answer, one that I soon found echoed
that of many other Bush doctrine adherents. "I've got no sense of where
this should ultimately go. Everybody is studying this, but I'm honestly
trying to understand this myself and come up with my position," he told
me. "This is complicated stuff." Not at all what we've come to expect
from the neocons. Huh? Why is that? Do we expect them to be
simple-minded dolts who don't think about "complicated stuff"? The
problem, writes Foer, is that some neocons disagree with other neocons: "In this instance, the neocons can't come to a consensus among themselves."
To my mind, this is a curious charge. Neoconservatism has never
been characterized by consensus. It doesn't comprise a "movement,"
according to Irving Kristol. Even the Iraq experience has seen a fair amount of dissension in the ranks. The problem is that Foer doesn't actually know who the neocons are. He writes: During the 1990s, a group of out-of-power intellectuals
gathered in a cluster of Washington institutions -- think tanks like
AEI, magazines like the Standard... Many denizens of these institutions proudly identified themselves as neoconservative. Well,
the truth is they didn't "cluster" in the 1990s so much as remain where
they've been for the past three decades. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael
Novak, Ben Wattenberg, Irving Kristol, and others came to AEI back in
the 1970s. The Public Interest and Commentary have been around even longer. And Scoop Jackson, after all, was only in Congress until 1983. Thus, another TNR editor, John
Judis, has identified an earlier period of
neoconservatism: For
14 years, from the 1973 Jackson-Vanik amendment until the 1987
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a group of intellectuals
known as neoconservatives shaped, and sometimes dominated, American
foreign policy. When Judis wrote that back in 1995, he
too proclaimed the "Fall of Neoconservatism." Now that Foer is
proclaiming the "End of Neoconservatism" in 2004, he simply rehashes
Judis's Foreign Affairs article. Here's Judis in 1995: I would draw a distinction between the dominant
idealistic strain of neoconservatism, expressed by Podhoretz and Rostow
in the 1970s, and a less visible realist strain that appeared, but did
not necessarily predominate, in essays by Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Here's Foer in 2004: The neoconservative mind has always had two lobes. One
side drives neocons toward idealistic language about America's ability
to spread human rights and democracy. This is the half that dominates
the thinking of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the
president's senior Middle East adviser, Elliot Abrams... The colder,
more analytic lobe of the neocon brain endorses all this talk about
democracy. But it couches these goals in a more realist context. It
doesn't want democracy planted out of altruism. It wants democracy
planted when it can promote U.S. interests. Charles Krauthammer and
Jeanne Kirkpatrick have been the most prominent spokespeople for this
lobe. Okay. Two strains, two lobes, whatever. Judis thinks
the strains split in the mid-1980s. Foer thinks the lobes are coming
apart today. The evidence for this crack-up, in both cases, is that
individual neoconservatives -- gasp! -- disagree with one another on
various issues. Judis writes: "None of these neoconservatives...continue to operate as a cadre. Indeed, they
frequently disagree -- about Bosnia, Haiti, and even whom to support
for president." Similarly, though more hysterically, Foer writes of
"the current paralysis, a moment of indecision that exposes the limits
of neoconservatism."
Frankly, I haven't seen this paralysis, but perhaps that's because
I don't expect the assorted pundits and politicians who fall in the
neoconservative category to "operate as a cadre" (or a cabal, for that
matter). There's an especially weird part of Foer's essay that
expresses this expectation: It is typical for hawks to blame the State Department
for our inchoate attitude toward the Iranians. But the neocons were
complicit in this. With their own divided minds, they didn't have a
clear alternative to push. The State Department and the neocons? What government agency do the neocons compose that they must
have only a single position -- or, more than that, a single mind --
between them? It just doesn't seem shocking to me that different
pundits have different minds. If Foer had investigated neoconservatism
a bit more, he would have found that this isn't a new insight. Way back
in 1980, Partisan Review published a symposium called "Neoconservatism: Pro and Con." Here's James Q. Wilson's contribution: There is no such thing as a neoconservative manifesto,
credo, religion, flag, anthem, or secret handshake. As a tendency, it
is shot through with inner tensions. The magazines to which I
contribute are edited and written by people who in most cases are aware
of these tensions and usually find easy answers hard to come by. This
often leads to the statement that neoconservatives never favor
anything. That's untrue. But they are rarely in favor of things that
can be stated simply. Neoconservatism is a mood, not an ideology. So
I tend not to agree that neoconservatism is ending because neocons are
thinking about "complicated stuff." Does Foer expect the same lockstep
conformity from liberals? Does The New Republic run on some kind of hive mind? Maybe that's what all this purge business is about. And perhaps it's all the strains and lobes that account for the
neocons' resurrection each time The New Republic pronounces them dead.
|
So I've read this