Posted under BookLog
I read this interesting passage from a review of Jacob Heilbrunn’ s new book on the history of neoconservatism They Knew They Were Right. This comes from Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum. I highlighted some important sentences in bold:
“There are two prodigious ironies in all this. The first is that, as Heilbrunn says, the neocons, those stalwart defenders of muscular intervention and national greatness, “have quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades.” The second is that despite this catastrophic failure, the neocons have essentially taken over the Republican Party without a fight. The younger generation of neocons has long argued that, lacking their elders’ epic transformation from liberal to conservative, they are really just conservatives, full stop. There’s nothing “neo” about them. Today, with their grandest project in tatters, they finally seem to be right. Despite their failure, it’s hard to find more than a tiny handful of Republicans who don’t support the neocon agenda wholeheartedly. From John McCain’s insistence on staying in Iraq forever to Rudy Giuliani’s invocation of the “terrorists’ war on us” to Mitt Romney’s call to “double Gitmo,” the neocon temperament is now, purely and simply, the conservative temperament. Israel, too, is now sacrosanct, even among Democrats—something that Heilbrunn argues must also be counted a neoconservative success.
Heilbrunn isn’t sure what to make of this. “The lack of accountability,” he says, “is, in fact, astonishing … But so far, the neoconservatives have essentially gotten off scot-free.” Partly this is because conservatives no longer have an alternative. As Heilbrunn notes elsewhere, there’s no new generation of foreign policy realists to replace the Scowcrofts and the Bakers of the old guard. In the absence of competition, neoconservatism has taken over almost by default. Partly, though, it’s because there was probably always less daylight between the neocons and the realists than either side thought. There are always easy cases, after all, when democracy promotion and national interest coincide, but outside of those cases, where the two collide, just how much democracy promotion has the neocon project really been responsible for? So far, practically none.
So perhaps it’s time to put the term to bed. In the same way that past political sects (Free Soilers, progressives, neoliberals) have eventually been subsumed into mainstream parties and lost their separate identities, so too has neoconservatism all but taken over present-day conservatism. The neocon temperament, far from being the mark of an embattled minority, is now the heart and soul of the modern Republican Party. Like it or not, it’s here to stay.”
To certain extent this is true, neocon thought does dominate much of the GOP whether your average Republican realizes it or not.
However, it is not a domination cast in stone. Otherwise David Frum would not be penning articles about “Unpatriotic Conservatives” and John McCain would not be ruminating about Ron Paul in interviews. The neocons set the tone because they have the proximety to opinonmakers and the powerbrokers within the cosmopolitan world and they are aided by countless radio talk show host and Republican politicians in the provinces who take their cues from them because they think that’s what the party line is or what counts as respectable opinion.
However, they do not completly control this great mass outside of their cosmopolitan world, especially if there’s not a Republican in the White House or Republicans running Congress giving orders from on high and controlling patronage.
Remember, it was back in 1999 that many Republicans shared Ron Paul’s view on the war in Kosovo, i.e. non-interventionist. Would they have felt differently if it was Republican president ordering the Air Forces’ planes to drop bombs on the Serbs? That’s hard to say, maybe they would have fell in line. But there would have been no underlying rationale for it (and it would be hard for them to explain to their constituents why their country’s planes were dropping bombs on a white, Christian people.) The cosmos may very well have influence and intellect but they do not have numbers and control nothing if no one lets them. After 9-11 however, all the rationales for our interventionist foreign policy a neocon could ever need or want was in place. And because of them, they led the way.
There’s a very good chance after 2008 Republicans will have no power whatsoever in Washington D.C. and thus its every politician for themselves. It’s in that kind of atmopshere that an opposition to the neocons has to be created. I highlighted sentences in bold from Drum’s book review to show what the problem is. For a lot of Republicans on foreign policy, with the exception of Ron Paul, there see no alternative than interventionism. That’s why it was so important for Ron to run even if he didn’t win. You can’t win any battle unless you choose at some point to fight.
That’s leads me to another book besides Heilbrunn’s that you should partake in reading at some point or add to a personal library, Bill Kauffman’s latest: Ain’t my America: The Long Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. On the cover is the elpahant symbol of the Republican Party with the peace sign on it. Here’s the synopsis:
“From ‘the finest literary stylist of the American right,’ a surprising and spirited account of how true conservatives have always been antiwar and anti-empire (Allan Carlson, author of The American Way) Conservatives love war, empire, and the military-industrial complex. They abhor peace, the sole and rightful property of liberals. Right? Wrong. As Bill Kauffman makes clear, true conservatives have always resisted the imperial and military impulse: it drains the treasury, curtails domestic liberties, breaks down families, and vulgarizes culture. From the Federalists who opposed the War of 1812, to the striving of Robert Taft (known as ‘Mr. Republican’) to keep the United States out of Korea, to the latter-day libertarian critics of the Iraq war, there has historically been nothing freakish, cowardly, or even unusual about antiwar activists on the political right. And while these critics of U.S. military crusades have been vilified by the party of George W. Bush, their conservative vision of a peaceful, decentralized, and noninterventionist America gives us a glimpse of the country we could have had-and might yet attain. Passionate and witty, Ain’t My America is an eye-opening exploration of the forgotten history of right-wing peace movements-and a clarion manifesto for antiwar conservatives of today. “
It’s been writers like Bill Kauffman and Justin Raimondo that have done much to revive heartland antiwar thinking whether from a right or formerly “progressive” viewpoint and I tried to do the same by looking at the anti-war, anti-cosmopolitan views of the independent political parties of the Upper Midwest (Progressives, Farm-Labor, Non-Partisan League) in my book Beating the Powers that Be. What pleased me the most about Paul’s camapaign was to see Constitution and Libertarian and Green activists work for it, which meant they did more to realitically elect a president than had done working in their own non-major party ghettos. Non-Major parties are good for local or even state politics but they ineffectual on the national level. Using such activists along with those Paul brought into the process can create a conservative antiwar, non-interventionist constituency, which is the only kind that is going to completly change U.S. foreign policy. It’s certainly not going to change from any other direction or with any other group or ideology (like International ANSWER for example) because no such group can spring forth from the provinces or from the broader middle class the way the antiwar right can.
Tad B Johnson on 12 Mar 2008 at 8:50 pm #
Patron, you’re writing a book?
The thing is that the GOP base really is in favor of foreign wars. The whole Kosovo thing was an aberration because a president we had a kneejerk hatred for was fighting it. Since Reagan and the seventies when we began defining ourselves as being anyhting that wasn’t liberal or hippie, ie in favour of fighting in Vietnma, the GOP base has been in favor of bombing as the primary means of foreign policy.
This may not be the authentic conserviatve tradition, but it’s been the mentality of both Republicans and conservative movment types since the seventies.
TBJ
roho on 12 Mar 2008 at 11:40 pm #
I can appreciate the position of Raimondo and others on the anti-war platform as much as I enjoy watching a Northern Liberal bitch about affirmative action.(WAR makes for strange bedfellows). Ron Paul was never the George Washington of his revolution, but simply Paul Revere. (George will come along later). As an old Paleoconservative, I have to remind myself that those EMPLOYEES of the Military Industrial Complex are part of an enormous industry!………….Like morticians, they make very good money off of the dead! (But, maybe he was a textile worker that lost his job to China). Neocons are textbook liberals in the tradition of FDR. They can easily manipulate “old conservatives” as the neojacobins have for decades:
1. Neojacobins never go to war, but go to Harvard instead.(And learn political manipulation of the masses to their own financial benefit.)
2. To expect a Vietnam Veteran to embrace the reality that LBJ nearly got him killed, and did get many of his friends killed, is to ask him to admit that he has been had. (In order to survive mentally, he has to convince himself that it was an honorable adventure.)
3. He then has to screw his offspring up by telling them that “Our Government Loves us, and by fighting for “Leviathan”, the North will actually forgive us for being Southerners.”
4. While trying to beat out a decent living in the private secter, he has no idea that Boeing and Raytheon are providing good paying jobs up north, and everyone can’t have a job building bombs and high tech weapons.
5. So, his children leave their mobile home, not for YALE, but for the volluntary military because Dad said, “We are conservatives and liberals are sissys!
6. The complexities of it all is staggering! And the sooner that the entire offspring of DIXIE becomes “ANTIWAR-ANTI-INTERVENTIONISTS” the sooner the true, few, paleocons, can stop talking worthless philosophy and revive this nation!
Tad B Johnson on 13 Mar 2008 at 3:42 pm #
I mean, really, can you guys think of a time since the seventies when the Republicans haven’t favored a military response to things that werent our business to begin with?
The only one that comes to mind is Kosovo, and that’s really more about knee jerk opposing Clinton than anything else. If you plot the data points on a trrend line it’s the only anomaly.
TBJ
Weaver on 13 Mar 2008 at 3:46 pm #
Somalia.
Republicans like to attack enemies.
Democrats like to save starving children and prevent ethnic cleansing.
In marketing they call these target markets.
—
It’s all in how the story is sold. Either group will buy a war as easily as the other though.
You can sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves if you tell her it’ll make her look younger: “rich in antioxidants and essential nutrients!”
And you can sell the same popsicle to a young man if you tell him it’ll boost his muscles: “all natural protein packed.”
Patroon on 13 Mar 2008 at 3:49 pm #
Tad,
I’ve written a book entitled Beating the Powers that Be: Indpendent Political Party’s of the Upper Midwest and their Relevance to Third Party of Today. You can find it on Amazon.com undermy author’s name, Sean Scallon.
Tad B Johnson on 13 Mar 2008 at 9:55 pm #
Weaver,
Well, the point that I’m making is that I think that the liberals, secular progressives and theistic progressives have all spent the last several years trying to sort out what they believe in and why – and we’ve done nothing but define ourself in opposition to them. I mean, think about every Republican race since 72. It’s always been “We’re the good people of America…” and then a whole bunch of vacuities, but the bulk of the campaign is about what we’re not: the liberals.
That being said, if a liberal says “Let’s ignore it” we say “BOMB IT!” if a liberal says “Diplomacy” we say “BOMB IT!”
It’s actually kind of sad. It’s the reason taht I usually refer to myself as a social traditionalist or culturla nostalgist instead of conservative. I just don’t want to be lumped in with those people.
TBJ
Weaver on 14 Mar 2008 at 1:26 am #
The Republican Party is truly the Stupid Party.