Ideologies in Flux

...Although Safire went on to trace the history of the word back to the early 1970s, significantly he said nothing about either foreign policy or Jews...

...As a Marxist might say, it is no accident that these last five figures are all Jewish...

...At a minimum, it would have been more difficult to paint the Democrats as weak on foreign policy—a charge that has dogged the party ever since...

...It is, after all, a prophetic movement, and “Prophets are not easily dissuaded from their crusade...

...Nobody knows yet who the new President is going to be, but one can guess, given the rhetoric of the past seven years, that the necessary explanations will be harder for a Democrat than for a Republican...

...Whatever final judgment one makes on the Clinton and second Bush administrations, the aftermath of 9/11 greatly increased the Democrats’ vulnerability on issues of national security, as the 2004 election demonstrated...

...Those who believe in Jewish conspiracies could have a field day with Heilbrunn’s book, contrary to his intentions, because he attributes so much of foreign policy in the last three Republican administrations to behind-the-scenes neocon influence...

...The titles of his chapters tell pretty much the whole story...

...Redemption” shows a number of them finding influential homes in the Ronald Reagan Administration...

...But Bill Clinton chose throughout his Administration to build up support from the Democratic base rather than reach out to the Right...

...Conservatives have often tried in vain to prove that fascism, especially in the form of Nazism, was really a revolutionary movement of the Left, not of the Right...

...Bush’s current unpopularity may have obscured this vulnerability for the moment, but it has not gone away...

...Foreign Policy, NL, September/ October, 2007...

...What happens if the next President has to face down new threats from Iran or China...

...Perhaps the time when Democrats could comfortably have reassimilated their lost tribe had definitively passed...

...He is not suggesting a great many voters considered themselves neoconservatives...

...As has frequently been noted before, the most important issues over which these largely (but not entirely) Jewish intellectuals fell out with their party were racial quotas at home and the Democrats’ flagging enthusiasm for anti-Communism, or even standing up forcefully for the national interest, after their Vietnam debacle...

...Times columnist David Brooks exaggerates only slightly when he declares that, to its opponents, “Con is short for ‘conservative’ and neo is short for ‘Jewish.’” At a time when conspiracy theories of Jewish domination have again become respectable in Europe, and at least semirespectable among Leftist American academics, the identification of neoconservatism with Jews is an important part of its reputation in the world...

...As Goldberg also reminds us, during World War I Wilson led the most authoritarian and repressive Administration in all of U.S...

...In Heilbrunn’s telling, neoconservatism is more of a network than a movement, a close-knit group of people who got to know each other in the 1970s or earlier and gradually became alienated from their original political home, the urban, Northeastern wing of the Democratic Party...

...Bush would weld together a new blend of optimism about spreading democracy and fear of the decline of the West if democracy failed to spread...

...Nazi,” they remind us, was short for “National Socialist...

...Had the Democratic Party managed to retain the neoconservatives,” Heilbrunn asserts while contrasting Carter’s foreign policy with Reagan’s, “it might never have suffered the devastating defeats it experienced in the 1980s, when it lost three successive Presidential elections...

...William] Kristol and [Robert] Kagan had reinvented Republican foreign policy...

...Jimmy Carter as President was not quite the same in this respect as Jimmy Carter the embittered ex-President...

...It may be no less fluid a word than conservative, no less desperately in search of a meaning that will win elections and, equally important, not make governing afterward impossible...

...after 1945 it became a general term of abuse, communicating almost nothing besides the fact that the person employing it was on the Left...

...a temperate philosophy, not sharply ideological, that takes modern democratic capitalism to be the best course in most cases...

...They almost invariably link it with the messianic President Woodrow Wilson...

...Before talking about such comparatively recent decades, Heilbrunn retells the familiar story of the so-called New York Intellectuals—Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and others—during their anti-Stalinist student days at City College...

...In “Exodus,” the radical sons of immigrants become liberal members of the post-World War II establishment...

...You get the impression from reading his book that Goldberg, a Jewish libertarian conservative who supports democracy and individual rights, simply got tired of listening to himself and politicians he admires being relentlessly attacked as Nazis and decided to retaliate in kind...

...It might be fair to say that, of the Democratic frontrunners at present, Hillary Clinton understands this and Barack Obama seems not to...

...Returning to their immigrant origins is important to his design because he has a theory of neoconservatism that requires the long sweep of history...

...Quite the contrary...

...What’s more, many of the neocons are extremely smart...

...Fascist” long ago lost the historical associations with inter-war Europe that gave it a definite meaning...

...If they could have influenced the Carter Administration to act decisively during the Iran hostage crisis, or prevailed on Walter Mondale in 1984 or Michael Dukakis in 1988 to run as a spiritual descendant of President Harry S. Truman rather than of Carter, Democrats might have won at least once...

...Most of the time neocon serves as a contemptuous name for any supporter of the George W. Bush Administration, especially of its foreign policies and particularly of the war in Iraq...

...To Some American Liberals and many Europeans who should know better, neoconservative is simply a euphemism for fascist (while ironically at the same time a synonym for Jew, despite the fact that most American Jews vote for Democrats...

...Progressive” is about as far as anyone in search of votes is willing to go...

...In “Return to Exile,” they blow it by encouraging George W. Bush to invade Iraq...

...Yet he believes neoconservatism is far from dead...

...The reinvention was easy, for “Bush fancied himself the heir to Reagan,” and “the neocons were in large measure the authors of what might be called the Reagan Synthesis...

...From Heilbrunn’s perspective, neoconservatism is not merely an ephemeral political ideology but something far more durable—an expression of the Jewish prophetic tradition that originated with Moses...

...Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Doubleday, 336 pp., $26.00) offers an ambivalent history of the movement from the standpoint of someone who was sympathetic for a while, moved Leftward years ago, but remains uncomfortable with many of the attacks on it...

...that the cult of the state and a quasi-militarization of the population have been prominent in Democratic administrations from the New Deal through the Great Society, from the Civilian Conservation Corps to AmeriCorps...

...In foreign policy, is progressivism now synonymous with pacifism...

...More hostile—and common—usage equates neoconservatism with militaristic imperialism abroad and supposed attempts to establish an authoritarian Executive branch at home...

...Safire’s definition seems about as far from today’s use of the appellation as one could get...

...WINTER BOOKS Ideologies in Flux By Christopher Clausen LONG BEFORE “neocon” devolved into a term of pure abuse like “fascist,” New York Times language columnist William Safire defined neoconservatism as “a political philosophy that rejects the utopianism and egalitarianism espoused by liberals but departs from conservatism by embracing collective insurance and cash payments to the needy...

...history...

...What happens if the next President has to tell the country that complete withdrawal from Iraq is not imminent and that many of the most bitterly attacked Bush Administration policies—from “rendition” to so-called domestic wiretapping to the Strategic Defense Initiative to free trade in the Americas to nuclear cooperation with India—should continue indefinitely...

...that the emphasis on racial identity in contemporary liberalism has some of the ugliness associated with earlier forms of race politics...

...It takes him all the way back to Biblical times...

...Call it the revenge of the neoconservatives...

...In Europe, where the term was unknown until recently, political figures like Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had never been closely associated with the neoconservative movement before, came to be lumped together with sometimes self-described neocons as Irving Kristol and his son William, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz...

...Does it mean pursuing policies that will keep the United Nations and our European friends happier than most of them have been for the past seven years...

...WHAT NEITHER AUTHOR would deny is that conservatism, both neo- and paleo-, is currently in disarray, probably in flux and possibly in retreat, though you would not know it from listening to Republican Presidential candidates...

...See “The Scapegoat on K Street,” Lawrence Grossman’s review of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S...

...Now Jonah Goldberg, a National Review contributing editor, has gone his predecessors one better by writing Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Doubleday, 487 pp., $27.95...

...The argument seems a barren one at this distance in history, but the continued use of these terms as political invective keeps it alive...

...Explaining their recent strength, he says that “for George W. Bush, the simplistic neoconservative credo would prove a perfect fit...

...Support for Israel is often mentioned as another point of disagreement, but in fact Democratic Presidential candidates from the 1960s through the ’80s, when most neoconservatives gradually shifted parties, were on the whole more pro-Israel than their Republican counterparts...

...In his account neoconservatives were what other journalists called moderates—people whose political attitudes were near the Center of the American spectrum—nothing for either adherents or opponents to get terribly excited about...

...It’s a curious irony that the most Wilsonian President in a generation is seen as a fascist by many people who would bristle at the suggestion that Wilson himself was a fascist...

...But what does progressive mean these days...

...They may regroup, reassess and retrench...

...that the Nazis crusaded against smoking and (believe it or not) for animal rights...

...That was never the case...

...While none of them now embraces the neoconservative label and few Republicans ever did, it is also worth remembering that practically no Democratic politicians call themselves liberals anymore...

...But these reckless minds . . . aren’t going away...

...Repeatedly he emphasizes that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not really a fascist, any more than Franklin D. Roosevelt was...

...Or, he might have added, that Wilson was a neoconservative...

...What price are we willing to pay to win them back...

...With the reaction against involvement in Iraq, Heilbrunn says, “it became fashionable on the Left to argue that the war had been prosecuted largely, if not exclusively, for the benefit of Israel and its neoconservative allies...

...That is, Kristol (the influential editor of the Weekly Standard) and Kagan (who wrote Of Paradise and Power and other books on foreign policy) were merely harvesting fruit from trees that earlier neocons had planted in the 1980s...

...Bush unpopular among all varieties of conservatives, some neocons were ready to come home...

...Goldberg points out accurately that a number of causes and impulses usually attributed to the Right, such as eugenics, were in fact liberal causes when they were flourishing in this country...

...A few of these are real parallels, but likening the kind of intrusive government many Democrats favor to the totalitarianism of Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler is so far-fetched that Goldberg’s heart is not in it...

...The few writers who employ it favorably, or at least neutrally, now tend to associate neoconservatism with the policy of assertively spreading democracy in unfriendly parts of the world...

...By 1992, with the Soviet Union gone and President George H.W...

...But for a period the neocons had an influence on elite opinion out of proportion to their numbers...

...In “Wilderness” they grow disillusioned with the Democratic Party...

...In any event, Clinton backed down from the aggressive foreign policy pronouncements he had made during the campaign on Bosnia and China, and on the domestic side he became a champion of racial policies the neoconservatives found distasteful...

...Bush’s democracy agenda—which I support—has become synonymous with a kind of neofascism around the globe and in many quarters at home,” he says...