STRANDED IN RIGHT Field
Blumenthal, Sidney
. . . In 1980, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a scholar whose specialty was Peronist Argentina, presented a full-blown theory, published in Commentary magazine, attributing the fall of the Nicaraguan and...
...Early this month, she prepared another column on the Philippines, at the very moment that its presidential election was taking place...
...They had been overrun by circumstances, unable to adjust, frozen in their past assumptions...
...But in the Philippines crisis, the neoconservatives exhibited a moral equivalence of their own—the equation of authoritarians and democrats...
...In December 1985, Kirkpatrick wrote a column ranking Marcos's Philippines in the top third of U.N...
...To be sure, the conjunction of the neoconservatives and the Soviets as the last apologists for Marcos was a curious event...
...The liberals had "good intentions," but they were guilty of "idealism...
...members in the good-government category...
...He was so impressed that he praised it during the 1980 campaign and named its author ambassador to the United Nations after the election...
...Perhaps the most apposite text on the neoconservatives' current condition is Kirkpatrick's famous Commentary essay...
...The unpleasantries uncovered by "American newspapers, newsweeklies and network newscasts" reflected an "obsessive intolerance" with "a nation of great strategic importance...
...Most of the neoconservatives, however, were not taking their cue from the real administration position but from Reagan's remarks, which he had repudiated himself...
...The pattern seemed obvious to Kirkpatrick: "Once these rulers had fallen" they were replaced by "more tragically repressive, aggressive dictatorships...
...And he sketched a scenario in which Aquino's victory fostered "bloody chaos leading to the rapid growth of Communist power...
...has been superseded...
...The shah and Somoza and other longgone dictators were recalled...
...Ronald Reagan was among the readers of Kirkpatrick's article...
...In an interview with the Washington Post on February 11, the president praised the emergence of a "two-party system" in the Philippines and wondered whether the election fraud was really just "one-sided...
...She dismissed the "pervasive and mistaken assumption that one can easily locate and impose democratic alternatives" in the Third World and the "equally pervasive and equally flawed belief that change per se in...
...The Philippines crisis, more than any other event of the 1980s, seemed made to order for the neoconservatives...
...They allowed the "blinding power of ideology" to govern their "interpretation of events...
...American liberals," she charged, were orchestrating a "campaign . . . to suggest the existence of an anti-Marcos 'consensus' inside the United States government...
...Her line became muddy...
...All the elements present in the Philippines were also present in their theory...
...On February 22, the neoconservatives found themselves in the unlikely and uncomfortable position of having the same line as Tass, the Soviet news agency, which attacked the U.S...
...The neoconservatives acted out of ideological conviction...
...She derided the idea that "deep historical forces," finally beyond the control of American policymakers, were at work...
...The Soviets' action was a classic demonstration of cynical realpolitik...
...democracy has won a mighty battle...
...for its "attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of the Philippines...
...On the morning of his press conference, policymakers at the White House had issued a statement expressing concern about Marcos's election fraud...
...Their advice had gone unheeded...
...The cardinal liberal sin, according to the neoconservatives, is "moral equivalence"—the equation of American and Russian shortcomings...
...In this one, she noted that "charges of fraud destroyed [the] perception" of "a creditable election...
...In 1980, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a scholar whose specialty was Peronist Argentina, presented a full-blown theory, published in Commentary magazine, attributing the fall of the Nicaraguan and Iranian autocrats to the Carter administration's "lack of realism...
...from the Filipino dictator...
...Carter's policy fostered instability, Kirkpatrick wrote...
...The conclusion they draw is that these regimes should be defended as if they were the seed of democracy, not the suffocating lid...
...REPRINTED FROM THE Washington Post March 2, 1986 273...
...Marcos, he concluded, must stay...
...In the heat of the Philippines controversy, no one articulated the neoconservative sensibility better than Owen Harries, the co-editor of the National Interest, a neoconservative quarterly intended to tutor the Reagan administration in foreign policy...
...And she insisted that "right-wing autocracies," unlike totalitarian ones, "do sometimes evolve into democracies...
...By failing to support Somoza and the shah, Carter had contributed to the rise of hostile regimes...
...She argued instead for backing "positively friendly" authoritarian rulers...
...He claimed the mantle of a higher realism: "Moral considerations .. cannot be the decisive factors leading to demands for the removal of President Marcos...
...Yet both sought to put aside soft sentimentality about democratic niceties in the service of national interest...
...Thus the old neoconservative doctrine was now declared obsolete...
...Soon, from the neoconservative columns, came a shower of praise for the new "two-party system" now in place in the Philippines...
...The result was "meddling" and "interference in Philippine politics...
...There was the "positively friendly" authoritarian dictator, the communist insurgency, the moderate "third force," and clear American interests—in the form of gigantic military bases...
...The "mistakes and distortions" of the Carter years were "all fashionable," she wrote...
...Something was happening that was...
...272 Strangely enough, Reagan's comments had little connection with the policy pursued by his administration...
...And Aquino's party was a ramshackle affair, sustained by deep popular yearnings, expressed mainly in the streets...
...But by the end, even a few neoconservatives seemed to question a theory that seemed to have so little relevance to what happened in the Philippines...
...But in fact there were not two parties and it wasn't a system...
...In this view, the election was more meaningful as an existential act than a political one...
...Marcos's organization was a party in the sense that the Gambino crime family is a party...
...more important than whether Ferdinand Marcos or Corazon Aquino 'wins,' " wrote Ben Wattenberg, the neoconservative writer, in the Washington Times...
...Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist with neoconservative sympathies, concluded this week that "the authoritarian-totalitarian distinction .. as a guide for deciding which regime the United States will push toward democracy...
...American policymakers, she urged, must "cease" their "interference" or we would suffer the fate of the explorer Magellan, who was "hacked to death" by "the Philippine tribes...
...As the column was being distributed by her syndicate, she rewrote it and sent out a revised version...
...autocracies is inevitable, desirable and in the American interest...
...Kirkpatrick suggested that the "campaign against the government of the Philippines" might "produce similar consequences...
...The Carter nightmare appeared to be recurring, only with Reagan in the White House...
...A day after Kirkpatrick's original and altered columns simultaneously appeared in various newspapers, Reagan made the debate muddier...
...Because authoritarian regimes have been toppled and replaced by democratic ones— for example, in Greece, Portugal and Argentina—the neoconservatives tend to see every permutation within authoritarianism as a hopeful step toward democracy...
...That evening, Reagan continued his musings at a press conference, at which he suggested "the possibility of fraud . . . on both sides...
...Certainly, their motives differed...
...On February 23, in the New York Times, he blamed the crisis on "the wellintentioned efforts of Americans of various political persuasions...
...The battle on the inside had already been won by those trying to extricate the U.S...
...In this living laboratory, the theory was put to the test...
...She denounced the "American role" as not "edifying" and cast doubt on charges of Marcos's election fraud—"it seems very unlikely...
...The failings of each were magnified by people who played on American political purism...
...But just as the Reagan administration was edging away from the weakening Philippine strongman, Kirkpatrick began edging away from her previously prepared column...
...The emergence of a "two-party system" seemed to bear out the Kirkpatrick thesis that authoritarian regimes could evolve into democracies...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
