Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/05/18/honestly_who_are_these_people.php

Honestly, Who Are These People?

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Lady Astor: Comrade Stalin, how long are you going to keep on killing people?

Stalin: As long as it is necessary. How many people were killed in the First World War? You killed that many people for nothing, and you blame us for killing a handful for the most promising social experiment in history?

Many ‘Neoconservatives’ have been prominent in the Bush Administration, including former Chief of Staff to the Vice President, Lewis I. “Scooter” Libby, now under indictment; Deputy Secretary of Defense and Libby’s professor at Yale, Paul D. Wolfowitz,; special advisor to the president, Elliott Abrams; ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton. All of them have been Republicans on a mission.

The intellectual ancestors of these men congregated just before World War Two in the now famous Alcove #1, just off the main dining hall at the City College of New York. They included the Jewish intellectuals Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Howe; Daniel Patrick Moynihan was among them too.

Across from Alcove #1 was Alcove #2, where the Stalinists hung out; the rivalry was acrimonious.

In 1940, one of Stalin’s agents assassinated Trotsky in Mexico, and with the war and post-war prosperity, Trotskyism became irrelevant, so the small group of Jewish intellectuals—and Moynihan—from Alcove #1, projected their Trotskyite enthusiasms for an internationalist body-politic into neoconservatism. The pathology of these mutations is described by Francis Fukuyama in his provocative new book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy .

Given time to reflect on what he believes to be the Bush Administration’s misjudgment and mishandling of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Fukuyama has symbolically broken political ties with his fellow-travelers in the neoconservative vanguard. In this spirit, his book contemplates the question: has neoconservatism changed or has a neoconservative simply lost faith? Replete with ambiguous reasoning, Fukuyama’s tortured answer splits the question by finessing his idealistic uber-vision with a none-to-soon pragmatic blink.

In America at the Crossroads, Fukuyama ascribes the political philosophy of neoconservatism to the latent anti-communism espoused by those one-time erudite Trotskyites in Alcove #1, way back at the City College. These studious revolutionaries were sympathetically predisposed to the economic and social revelations of Marx and Lenin—they were romantic socialists, after all—but they crouched in pusillanimous horror at the evil monstrosity of communism, then rode rough-shod by Comrade Stalin.

Fukuyama explains that the “Trotskyites understood better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime.” As it is, Stalin had their hero, Trotsky, murdered for the sin of unorthodoxy. The intellectuals of Alcove #1 realized that trying to engineer a utopian society, a communist utopia, would, unfortunately, necessitate a good deal of senseless violence and barbarity, as was once candidly explained to Madame Astor by Comrade Stalin.

As a result, these fresh “conservatives” came to articulate a convincing critique of social engineering; a critique with special domestic implications after the moral failure of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Fukuyama states the obvious when he opines that social engineering should be handled prudently in the face of unexpected consequences; and certainly, Johnson’s Great Society worsened the plight of the poor, with its perverse incentives and misjudgment of Marx’s “superstructure”—few would argue that it created more independence and choice in those he deemed to liberate.

And thus, awakened to the pragmatic catch-as-catch-can of reality, the former leftists veered right, but only marginally.

To say that the founders of neoconservatism were actually conservative, in any way that Edmund Burke would understand the term, is a stretch—a fact unwittingly made clear by Fukuyama himself in the second half of his book, which he devotes to outlining America’s moral obligation to interfere in “developing” countries by economically and politically “helping” them. It should be clear that the neocons are really inheritors of Woodrow Wilson and his idealistic worldview that America must make the world “safe for democracy.”

And so, with evangelical zeal, they maintain that America should spread the good news around the world. But the neocons think big. Wilson was a mere dabbler, containing his enthusiasms to Western countries, whereas the Neoconservatives are in effect global, or hard, Wilsonians. Traditional conservatives and their innovative counterparts were an easy fit in the days of global communism and the Cold War, but the times change.

At this point, an important distinction should be made between the neoconservatives and what Fukuyama calls “mainstream,” or traditional conservatives. Both were cold warriors, but for different reasons. The neoconservatives sympathized with the aims of communism before it all came crashing down around their heads with the revelations of Stalin’s purges (30+ million souls wiped out), and in the spirit of the dialectic, turned against it; the traditional conservatives, rather, saw communism as an evil for evaluative reasons. Communism was atheistic, nihilistic, hostile, and anti-free market, which made it anti-choice, all of which were enough to be condemned as evil by any self-respecting traditional conservative.

The overarching implication gathered from Fukuyama’s analysis here is that the fundamentals of neoconservative thought are inherently secular, while the fundamentals of traditional conservative thought derive their strength from the permanence of first principles. Yet, both groups of conservatives held dear the same goal throughout most of the 20th century: to end communism. So, to invoke William James, is the distinction between the neocons and the traditionalists, a distinction that really makes a difference, if the consequences are, in the end, the same? James would say no; Fukuyama remains confused, and this is why his book is unclear at times.

Clearly, Fukuyama has a soft-spot for the core of the neoconservative soul and is driven to preserve his romantic memories to that effect by reminiscing on neoconservative successes. Yet, Fukuyama is only half right; the examples he cites were indeed successes, but they were successes of the traditional conservatives, not of the innovating neocons. To be a traditional conservative, you innately trust the wisdom of the ages because that wisdom has, for the most part, survived history.

G.K Chesterton, in a quintessentially conservative way, recalls that in a true democracy, the dead would have a vote too. Thus, the conservative is, by definition, as skeptical of innovation and change as of rebellion and revolution. The traditionalist does not need to look further than the French Revolution, or more apropos to the topic, the Russian Revolution, to understand the horrors of ideological change. Instead, the conservative only values change as it emerges like fresh growth from the past, a view not shared by the technicians and ideologues in the neoconservative camp.

Fukuyama claims America’s triumph over communism and the successive democracies established in Eastern Europe as vindications of neoconservatism: the revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia come to mind. But the historical consensus seems to be that the triumph of democracy in Eastern Europe was the result of two factors: first, the innate flaws embedded in communist ideology that yielded its inevitable demise and, second, an American foreign policy that coupled itself with the realization that the USSR would and must eventually dissolve. Based on the successes in Eastern Europe, Fukuyama prescribes a foreign policy of cautious response to specific situations and an acceptance that organic change is gradual, and political change, though deliberate, is prudential.

He writes, “Democracy, in my view, is likely to expand universally in the long run. But whether the rapid and relatively peaceful transitions to democracy and free markets made by the Poles, Hungarians, or even the Romanians can be quickly replicated in other parts of the world, or promoted through the application of power by outsiders at any given point in history, is open to doubt.” Indeed. Liberal social engineering has failed more often than not. Considering the disastrous consequences of such engineering in Haiti, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Bolivia and a host of other nations, it becomes clear that the successes of Eastern Europe’s democratic revolutions were the exceptions that proved the rule.

Yet, Fukuyama, the neo-something, now prefers something more akin to Burkean conservatism, not neoconservatism. The successful methods used to quicken the collapse of Eastern European totalitarianism are now being employed, with more military zeal, into the Middle Eastern imbroglio, by way of accelerating history—which is actually a communist doctrine: nothing conservative about it.

After America won the Cold War, according to the author, the neocons became overly progressive, much to Fukuyama’s dismay. Before the end of the Cold War, the neocons were, in their aims, indistinguishable from traditional conservatives; both were anticommunist, both were skeptical of eviscerating culture in a welfare state, both opposed the radicalism of the New Left and counter-culturalism. Each of these measures, in themselves, were revolts against communism or communist-related ideologies; so it’s no surprise that the grip that held the hands together loosened after the Soviet Union imploded.

In the 1990s, a particularly hawkish form of neoconservatism come to the fore, one that favored preemption, preventive war, American exceptionalism and America extending its benevolent hegemony. This burgeoning form of neoconservatism had been articulated in the pages of the Weekly Standard by William Kristol and Daniel Kagan, and has informed the so-called Bush Doctrine—the foreign policy apparatus and initiative that led to Iraq. Kristol and Kagan famously wrote an article which outlined the new neoconservative agenda that America must “resist, and where possible, undermine rising dictators and hostile ideologies;…[and] provide assistance to those struggling against the more extreme manifestations of human evil.”

This is where Fukuyama criticizes what neoconservatism has become. He (probably correctly) points out that the neocons, freshly out of the Cold War, overestimate the threat that undemocratic regimes around the world truly pose to the United States. Fukuyama writes, “Conceiving the larger struggle [against terrorism] as a global war comparable to the World Wars or the Cold War vastly overstates the scope of the problem.” And so, as an antipode to neoconservative foreign policy, he offers a new kind of foreign policy that he terms Realistic Wilsonianism —which is of course a bizarre contradiction in itself.

Wilsonianism, by virtue of its idealism, cannot concede realism; this is where Fukuyama runs into problems, which is unfortunate because the opening half of his book does a wonderful job of elucidating the roots of neoconservatism and the failures of the Bush administration while implementing the neoconservative policy agenda.

Fukuyama is a critic of social engineering notwithstanding his simultaneous push for American pro-activism in bringing economic and political freedom to nations that are deemed in need of such radical political surgery. It is our “moral imperative” as a wealthy super-power he says. Yet, he also advocates a gradual transition to democracy that is aided by “soft power,” in other words, non-military interventions that allow measured and prudent policies to lead to the desired regime change in n’importe quelle authoritarian nation.

As Fukuyama understands it, the apotheosis of neoconservatism came when America won the Cold War, by means of the soft power policies, which he painstakingly tries to ascribe to neoconservatives. Unfortunately, Fukuyama fails to show how the Cold War was a neoconservative success inasmuch as it was simply a triumph of, to use an old-fashioned phrase, self-described “conservatives.” Apart from the underlying flaws and contradictions of communism, the Berlin Wall fell because of Reagan’s measured and methodical response to the USSR; a response that was informed by moral appeals not necessarily to democracy, but against the “evil empire” that was the Soviet empire.

From his response to communism, to his emphasis on a capitalistic free-market, Reagan is not the neo-conservative that Fukuyama makes him out to be. What’s more, with their pro-active desire to make the world suited for democracy and their disregard of a nation’s sovereignty to govern itself, the neoconservative are not conservative at all; they are in fact exceedingly liberal where it matters, in the marrow.

Nothing demonstrates this more than the little revolutions that have occurred internally within the movement itself, which are really akin to one identity crisis after another: from Stalinist, to Trotskyite, to Cold War liberal to jingoist—instability abounds, and we are to believe that this is the hallmark of prudential change, worthy of the imprimatur, conservative? Professor Louis Menand dryly describes these “breaks” in the neoconservative movement as looking “from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it is impossible to say which is which.” Fukuyama’s book represents another of these breaks, and so it must be read with a healthy skepticism: as an intellectual reflection on the roots and evolution of neoconservatism, it is often insightful; as a foreign policy manual, it is wanting, confused and in need of something from the past: tradition.