http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/wint.../alexander.html

Anti-anti-neoconservatism

A review of America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke

Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana, by Gary Dorrien

Bashing George W. Bush has been the thinking person's sport for four years now. Foreign policy intellectuals play their own version of the game: bashing neoconservatives. This is Bush-bashing with a Ph.D. It has proven surprisingly popular, attracting onto the field not only liberals but also some traditional conservatives and many conspiracy theorists, for whom the neocons are the new Trilateral Commission. Sadly, a lot of this commentary is plagued by the same vices as Bush-bashing in general: chronic exaggeration, fast-and-loose connection-drawing, and over-the-top hyperbole. Reading it is enough to turn you into a fervent anti-anti-neoconservative.

This is a pity, because with Bush's re-election "the neoconservative question" is ripe for debate, and this high-stakes debate should be as well-informed as possible.

Instead, vitriol has already poisoned it. To blame are at least two propositions put forth by many critics of the neocons, including the authors of both these new books. The first is that there is such a thing as a tightly-knit and highly ideological community of neocons obsessed with unilateralism, military force, preventive war, and social engineering in the Middle East. It hardly helps that neocons have been defined not by themselves but by their critics. The second premise is that after 9/11, this group seized control of—Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke actually use the word "hijacked"—U.S. national security policy by virtue of their zeal and the on-hand nature of their pre- packaged agenda.

These premises lead many critics of neoconservatism, including these three authors, to make three crucial errors. First, viewing neocons as an ideological community invites these critics to treat neocon thinking as a self-contained text, subject to exegesis, as if it were a religious doctrine or a text-driven ideology like Marxism. (It may be relevant that Gary Dorrien is a professor of religion, not international relations.) This has one big consequence: it invites many critics to summarize and present neocon thinking (sometimes fairly, as in Dorrien's case) without rendering the crucial service of evaluating its validity compared to alternative schools of foreign policy thinking such as traditional realism and liberal institutionalism.

Second, the "hijacking" imagery invites critics to oversell neocon influence. These and other commentaries suggest that when 9/11 drove up "demand," so to speak, for new policies, a single factor on the supply side—the ruthless zeal of neocon ideologues—caused Bush to adopt a new foreign policy. This overlooks the rest of the "supply" situation: the fact that other ideas on offer at the time were, to put it kindly, unpersuasive. Finally, the combination of these two premises leads nearly all critics to grossly mischaracterize post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy as systematically unilateralist and militaristic, when in fact is has been multifaceted and highly experimental.

Halper and Clarke are self-declared Reagan-style conservatives, though of an exceedingly curious kind. They draw inspiration from Howard Dean, and Clarke, for his part, is a resident fellow at the Cato Institute, whose foreign policy is usually called isolationist. They trace the intellectual roots of today's neocons to the people who first earned that label in the 1960s. This is bad intellectual history. The fact is, the first group called "neocon" wasn't especially homogeneous; the second group isn't much more so; and the two put together aren't at all. Even when today's neocons are literally the descendants of those so labeled in the 1960s, change is at least as evident as continuity in their assumptions about how the world works and what to do about it.

Carrying over the name from one group to the other is really a contrivance, based partly on sociology (both groups are intellectual, disproportionately Jewish, and not on the Left) and partly on occasional connections (some familial, some professional, as in: Richard Perle once worked for original neocon Scoop Jackson). But for serious analysis, the label comes close to having no utility. Yet Halper and Clarke, and to a lesser extent Dorrien, treat the later ones as organic extensions of the earlier ones. Halper and Clarke smooth out these exceedingly rough edges by talking more about family links, publishing venues, and topics of conversation than about the actual ideas that supposedly define this school of thought, or, as they call it, "political interest group." (Just out of curiosity: What is the "interest" in question?)

The original neocons were heavily concerned with the theoretical assumptions that lay behind government policies. They focused much more on domestic than foreign policy, which is emphasized by students of the original neocons, like Peter Steinfels, and is apparent in the pages of the paradigmatic neocon journal, The Public Interest. (The neocon circles at Commentary magazine are, of course, a slightly different matter.) They were famously impressed with the power and durability of culture, and approached large-scale government interventions with skepticism. Jeane Kirkpatrick's essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards" specifically extended this skepticism to the contention that the U.S. could fine-tune regime outcomes in the developing world. Like any set of serious people searching for solutions to big problems, the neocons disagreed with each other almost as much as they agreed. They had in common a repulsion for the New Left. But to treat them as a tightly-knit "ism" is like treating "Protestants" that way just because they all left Catholicism for vaguely related reasons.


* * *
Even worse than homogenizing the first neocons is jointly homogenizing both groups called neocon. This is often done without much intellectual connective tissue ever being identified. Today's neocons are labeled on the basis of foreign policy alone, and are not assumed necessarily to share a single domestic policy position. Moreover, the litmus test for identifying a neocon today is said to be the belief that the U.S. is capable of crafting democracies in the Middle East and must set about that task. This belief would strike—has already struck—several original neocons as utopian and imprudent. It is better, or maybe it's worse, that Dorrien recognizes such differences but then, just as if he hadn't, lumps all these people into the same intellectual history anyway.

It should come as no surprise that critics also over-identify doctrinal similarities among today's neocons. It's easy to do: Just quote someone labeled a neocon as saying something, then designate that something as part of neocon ideology, and finally suggest that all neocons, including those in office, devote themselves to advocating that something. The result is not just homogenization but hyperbole. Neocons are skeptical of treaty guarantees? Halper and Clarke conclude that they are "instinctively antagonistic toward international treaties and agreements." Neocons often find military strength handy? Halper and Clarke conclude that they see "the use of military force as the first, not the last option of foreign policy." Neocons want to hit the Taliban and Saddam with bombs, not subpoenas? This shows they reject "the classic antiterrorism tools of police and intelligence work." They define today's main threat as violent Islamism in search of WMDs? They must share an "open hostility" to Islam.

And when the labeling reach exceeds the definitional grasp, things get messy. Dorrien says National Review is neocon, but Halper and Clarke don't put it on their list. Halper and Clarke say the Heritage Foundation is neocon, but Dorrien doesn't even list it in his index, even though both Heritage and NR backed to the hilt the signature neocon project of Iraq. Both books say Donald Rumsfeld is not a neocon. That doesn't seem controversial, since almost everyone says that. Except that he seems to me to meet the criteria Halper and Clarke adopt (on page 11) to define neocons. But he's out anyway. Both books say Daniel Pipes is a neocon. But Pipes is a well-known skeptic of Middle East democratization. Maybe they put him in because he likes to quote Bernard Lewis, and apparently neocons like to do that.

This feels less like rigorous analysis and more like teenagers haphazardly joy-riding through a think-tank with a paintball gun. Over fifteen years ago, Seymour Martin Lipset urged that the term neoconservative, while not useless historically, be dropped as "irrelevant to further developments within American politics." We should have been so lucky.

All this matters, instead of just being silly and sloppy, because the labeling game has a very specific effect on the debate over neoconservatism. When the two generations of neocons are shoved together, and their ideas are homogenized and then traced to alleged theoretical tap-roots like Straussianism, the overwhelming impression left with readers is that today's neoconservatives should be understood above all as an ideological community. And this misimpression has big implications. For one thing, as a debating tactic, it un-levels the playing-field from the start, by portraying neocons as ideologues who collide uncomfortably with reality. This leaves other foreign policy approaches free to claim that they, in contrast, are realistic or pragmatic, as virtually all of neoconservatism's critics do. Halper and Clarke identify "the fatal neoconservative flaw: conceptual overreach and the absence of pragmatism."

More important, treating neocons as an ideological community invites critics to treat their ideas as the product of an ideological heritage instead of as the product of hard-won, real-world experience. If they saw them as the latter, critics would set out instead to evaluate the validity of neocon ideas compared to other foreign policy proposals on offer. This should come naturally to Halper and Clarke. After all, they say neocons should be analyzed as a "political interest group," and political science research on that subject usually highlights competition between interest groups. But Halper and Clarke focus only on neocons in isolation. This leaves them saying, with many others, that neocons took over after 9/11 because they "were ready with a detailed, plausible blueprint." This suggests there wasn't competition between points of view, and that neocons took over foreign policy without a fight because they were zealous and well-positioned.

This asks us to ignore the traditional realists and liberal institutionalists who were also full of advice and on the scene. As Norman Podhoretz says, it also asks us to believe "that strong-minded people like Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice could be fooled by a bunch of cunning subordinates." Consequently, it precludes consideration of the crucial possibility that maybe those people adopted key neocon proposals because rival approaches did not provide credible alternatives. After the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, U.S. leaders faced two overarching national security questions: What should U.S. grand strategy be in a "unipolar" world? And how should America deal with violent Islamism and its global ambitions? "Neoconservatism" can be understood as an alternative, on these two matters, to traditional realism and liberal institutionalism. And a careful reading of the facts, as opposed to a reading of some texts, suggests that the common stereotype is a caricature of the neocons, not a useful guide to them.


* * *
America today stands astride the world as no other country in history. This is not because it is inherently more powerful than everyone else. Other states combined amply possess enough population, money, and technology to check America. America is daunting because, first, it has no close single rival, and second, it mobilizes its capabilities in defense spending at a higher rate than most. Neither condition seems likely to fade anytime soon. Here, neocons have a lot in common with realists but differ sharply with liberal institutionalists. Liberal institutionalists say unipolarity cannot last, so America should soften its (inevitable) relative decline by intertwining all countries in international institutions favorable to us, as they insist it did after 1945.

There are two problems with this. Ohio State University's Randall Schweller points out the first: "Had American policymakers...been persuaded by the chorus of scholars in the 1970s to late 1980s proclaiming that U.S. power was in terminal decline"—persuaded, that is, to accommodate rather than confront the U.S.S.R.—"the Cold War might have continued for decades longer." Instead, Reagan avoided decline "through bold policy choices." The record simply does not support the belief that America is inevitably declining now any more than then. Thus, neocons and realists are basically indistinguishable in proposing to maintain U.S. military power at least at present levels.

Second, realists and neocons are also agreed that international institutions and agreements are not reliable guarantors of security. This, too, is a response to real-world events. Yet many critics of neoconservatism, including Dorrien and Halper and Clarke, often fail even to mention events—regularly invoked by neocons (and realists) to explain this posture—such as Hitler's treaty violations, collective security failures of the League of Nations and the U.N., and Soviet arms control violations. Amazingly, these books don't even mention North Korea's violation of its 1994 agreement with the Clinton Administration. Neither book lets on that the U.N. failed Rwandans. Dorrien doesn't mention that the Kosovo operation would have been nixed had it required U.N. approval; Halper and Clarke only do so in passing. Don't expect Darfur to get much coverage in any second editions. Leave out little details like these, and it's easy to portray neocons as doctrinaire, and to avoid engaging substantively with their reasoning (not that some neocons don't return that particular favor).

Traditional realists urge caution in a unipolar world for the very different reason that restraint is the bold choice that can help keep the world unipolar, by avoiding frightening other countries into "balancing" against a threatening America. But this, too, is questionable. There is reason to believe that most nations do not balance against the U.S. as they do against others, because we are oceans away and have a history of benign intentions. The test of which side is correct is unfolding before our eyes, and so far the neocons have the field. Despite America's power and recent behavior, there is simply no evidence that other countries are even beginning to balance against us.

Moreover, the advice to tread exceedingly cautiously—proffered by some realists and especially by isolationists—is based on the flawed premise that the most likely source of long-term threats is an in-your-face American presence around the world. Sometimes the opposite seems the case. Warding off major threats means encouraging other major powers to remain peaceful rather than becoming dangerously aggressive. That requires an ambitious system of carrots and sticks, which, in turn, requires a ramped-up U.S. military; U.S. involvement in many regional conflicts; and a worldwide network of bases, landing rights, and allies. The most obvious example of this phenomenon is the fact that the extensive and expensive U.S. presence in Western Europe and northeast Asia after 1945 had pro-American, not anti-American, effects. Today, China is surrounded by weak states and might be tempted to pursue a war-making path to power and glory. If we want to make sure that its incentives are to be peaceful instead, we have to hem China in with U.S. allies and credible, if implicit, U.S. threats. That means keeping a toe in Japanese and Korean matters, in shipping-land controversies, Chinese border disputes, and more. But if all that keeps China on a path of peace, economic growth, and gradual liberalization, it will have paid off handsomely. Here, too, neocons and many realists are broadly agreed.

But aren't neocons overreliant on the use of force? A focus on a stylized neocon "ideology" misses some basic distinctions. The first is between challenges to U.S. primacy and other sorts of challenges. Like realists, most writers and officials called neocon don't advocate a massive U.S. presence in Latin America, South Asia, or sub-Saharan Africa, because those regions host no possible strategic competitors. A second distinction is between the possession of force and its actual use. Dorrien and Halper and Clarke suggest that neocons conflate the two, saying for example that neocons prefer war as a first resort and eschew other tools of foreign policy. But their evidence for this is sparse. Neocons like Paul Wolfowitz say America should vigorously contain China, not invade it. And even the hawkish are uncertain whether it makes sense to attack nuclear facilities in North Korea and Iran.

In sum, on the question of U.S. grand strategy in a unipolar world, a strictly liberal institutionalist agenda has not been persuasive even to Democratic leaders like Bill Clinton and John Kerry. And realists and neocons are divided by less than meets the eye. On the subject of violent Islamism, neocons are made more distinguishable by their emphasis on political reform in the Middle East. But on this score, their rivals have less to propose by way of alternatives.

September 11 presented U.S. leaders with the second question: how to deal with the rise of violent Islamism and its global atrocities? It is not surprising that Bush did not adopt the liberal institutionalist agenda in the days that followed. Halper and Clarke speak for many when they recommend a grab-bag of law enforcement, renewed alliances, non-proliferation agencies, cooperation with non-governmental organizations, and restoration of America's pre-9/11 reputation. This amounts to the broad contours of foreign policy under the elder Bush and Bill Clinton. And that is the America against which al-Qaeda initiated the 9/11 plot to begin with, and the America that was vulnerable to that plot. This supposedly progressive vision gets us straight back to September 10. A more muscular approach was inevitable. Any U.S. government would have, for example, toppled the Taliban. But what then?

Many realists might have preferred to deter remaining rogue states and terrorists. But if deterrence works on these players, why didn't the fear of reprisal stop the Taliban from permitting the 9/11 plot to proceed from their territory? Why did they then reject Bush's 11th hour ultimatum? After that, why did Saddam not save his throne? Why does Iran not abandon its nuclear research even when our distaste is made clear? It's possible that these radical regimes became convinced that America would not strike them, even after Afghanistan, and that an even more unignorable lesson needed to be taught. This is why many realists joined neocons in arguing that Iraq was a logical occasion for teaching that lesson. But both schools are now unclear on whether these lessons are enough, or more are needed. Instead of revealing bloodthirstiness, this reveals an experimental approach. We simply don't know yet how the remaining rogue states will act. The jury is still out, and policy is properly tentative. In that spirit of flexibility of means, neocons don't seem afraid to acknowledge the desirability and even periodic indispensability of allies, which is why John Bolton launched the multilateralist Proliferation Security Initiative. (How do critics reconcile the PSI to the neocons' alleged dogmatic unilateralism? Dorrien does it by not mentioning it, Halper and Clarke by not explaining what it is.)

What about dealing with the terrorists themselves? Realists and liberal institutionalists have no policies custom-tooled to the novel fact that on 9/11 America was attacked by an organization that emerged from a subculture of sympathy, financing, and recruiting spread across more than a dozen countries. Small cells from that subculture, with minimal infrastructural support, have gone on to inflict further massacres in Bali, Madrid, and elsewhere. What exactly is the West supposed to do? Neocons distinctively argue that Mideast tyranny is the taproot of radicalism and that democratization will cut it off. This strikes liberal institutionalists as needlessly provocative and realists as recklessly meddling. But the notion that U.S. national security policy should be to change domestic arrangements in other countries isn't novel. Note that America focused on obliterating the Nazi and Soviet regimes, not their countries.

But on this issue more than any other, neocons are on weak ground. It is clear neither why authoritarianism might cause extremism in the Middle East but not elsew— that democracy is the default outcome when people are relieved of a vicious dictatorship—is not well-founded.

Then again, neocons do not seem single-minded on the subject, inasmuch as the administration simultaneously cooperates with many authoritarian regimes.

The neocon approach to unipolarity is bold but well within the American mainstream. Their views about the actual use of force are utterly conventional. Their take on deterrence is cloudy, but for now so is the evidence. Finally, their taste for political reform in the Middle East may not be persuasive to many (myself included), but the administration has stopped at one experiment, and its critics have precious few alternative strategies to offer. This approach blends ambition with far more pragmatism than its critics give it credit for.

Halper and Clarke call their chapter on Iraq a "case study" of neocon assumptions, methods, and results. This is deeply disingenuous. That term implies that they selected Iraq from a wider sample of possible cases. But what other "case" fits their caricature? They have lost all perspective. It is reductio ad iraqum. And it has swept the nation.

A spectacular attack on America led U.S. military power to be applied to only two regimes in only one region of the world. Since the campaign against al-Qaeda is being pursued globally and not just in those two countries, most of it must be being waged bilaterally or multilaterally. It is, but you would never know it from these studies. Halper and Clarke say that neocons reject the "the full range of initiatives available...political, financial, legal, and diplomatic." But the administration approaches Iran and North Korea multilaterally. Syria faces economic sanctions, not invasion. Broadcasting in Arabic has been stepped up. And the Bush Administration is working daily with dozens of governments, gathering intelligence, tracing money, and tracking suspects.

And these governments are cooperating not because they are "bribed and coerced" but because they have a stake in defeating violent Islamism, too. This very much includes Russia, China, and also the European Union, which now officially identifies its number one security threat as terrorists armed with WMDs—practically a page torn from Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy. Yet Halper and Clarke decry "America alone" and say it is in a "virtual one-on-one confrontation with Islamic radicalism." While they're at it—why stop there?—they blame neocons for the Patriot Act and say America stands today at the brink of an "Orwellian reality." Their account initially seems breathless; it turns out they're hyperventilating.

Americans need to decide what to make of neoconservative ideas. It might be possible to make a case effectively demolishing them. So far, that case hasn't been made.

http://www.uncommonknowledge.org/800/804.html (includes media files)

Funding for this program is provided by
John M. Olin Foundation and Starr Foundation.
Peter Robinson: Today on Uncommon Knowledge, the fight on the Right.

Announcer: Funding for this program is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation.

[Music]

Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson. Our show today, in 21st century America, what does it mean to be a conservative? For decades, the American conservative movement was coherent. Its leaders were William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, and its great unifying cause was opposition to communism. Well, now the Cold War is over and a new generation of conservatives is coming into its own. It turns out though that that new generation is divided into a couple of camps. On the one hand, a new kind of conservative, the neo-conservative. On the other, conservatives who think of themselves as traditional conservatives, the paleo-conservatives. As you're about to see, the neo-cons and the paleo-cons don't like each other very much. What is a neo-con, what is a paleo-con and what does the dispute between them portend for the future of American conservatism?

Joining us, two guests--Steve Hayward is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of The Age of Reagan, The Fall of the Old Liberal Order. John Theodoracopulos, known as Taki, is a columnist and editor of the new paleo-conservative magazine, The American Conservative.

Title: The Right Stuff

Peter Robinson: Taki Theodoracopulos, writing in his new magazine The American Conservative, I quote you, "We are now in a senseless war that was promoted by the neo-conservatives, the Arab world will sink into despair and terrorists the world over will find thousands of young men ready to die as long as they take an American with them." David Frum in National Review, in an article entitled, "Un-patriotic Conservatives," quote, "The paleo-conservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy Republic. What are we to make of self described conservatives who make excuses for suicide bombers." Briefly, what are we to make of the paleo-conservatives? Steve?

Steven Hayward: Well, what you see is something that happens a lot in political argument whereas differences over principles that can be discussed calmly descend into personality clashes and the kind of invective that characterizes a lot of our politics, not just on the right, it exists on the left as well.

Peter Robinson: Taki?

Taki Theodoracopulos: Just because we oppose an American empire, that doesn't make us unpatriotic.

Peter Robinson: All right, so we've got the terms here--the neo-conservatives and the paleo-conservatives--let's spend a moment just exploring the taxonomy here. I'll quote Pat Buchanan, again writing in the American Conservative, "Who are the neo-conservatives? Ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism's long march to power with Ronald Reagan. A neo-conservative is more likely to be a magazine editor than a brick layer, he's likely to be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American Enterprise Institute." We ask a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, so what is distinctive about neo-conservatives--that they all used to be liberals? Where do they come from?

Steven Hayward: Well, you know, I think the term originated with Michael Harrington, the socialist far-left politician back in the '70s and of course he didn't mean it as a compliment. I think it was Irving Kristol who was called the godfather of neo-conservatism, who said that a neo-conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. I suppose one difference between what we now call paleo-cons and neo-cons is that a lot of the neo-conservatives were social scientists. They came to understand that the welfare state didn't work for a variety of reasons. They came to understand that detente and foreign policy weakness was inimical to the country's future. And where I would disagree with Pat's characterization is I don't think they were sort of a rump that rode on the conservative movement's drive to power, I actually argue that they helped complete that drive to power. Ronald Reagan would not have been elected and would have been able to govern us effectively without some of the prominent neo-conservatives who joined the Republican side.

Peter Robinson: Fair characterization?

Taki Theodoracopulos: Fair characterization except the only thing I disagree with Steve's analysis is that I think that the neo-cons saw what was coming with the coming of Reagan, how people have finally caught on, and they just joined the bandwagon.

Peter Robinson: Okay, Samuel Francis writes in again, theAmerican Conservative that "paleo-conservatism developed as a reaction against trends in the American right during the Reagan Administration, including the bid for dominance by the neo-conservatives." So funnily enough, it's the paleo-conservatives who are the more recent establishment.

Taki Theodoracopulos: No, I don't agree with that because Samuel Francis does say that, but Samuel Francis splits people into--he thinks that what is referred to as paleo-conservatism--he thinks that we are patriots and that the neo-conservatives are nationalists. So he has a different--I like what he writes of course, I don't agree with that though. Paleo-conservatives, it's very simple, we just wanted to conserve family and traditions that made this country great.

Peter Robinson: Taki and Patrick Buchanan have founded a magazine, The American Conservative to present the viewpoint of the paleo-conservatives. Let's take a look at the magazine's mission statement.

Title: Prepare to Be Assimilated

Peter Robinson: First immigration, I quote from your mission statement, "We believe that America has gained and still does from new immigrants, but we also after two decades of intense immigration, believe that the nation needs a slowdown to assimilate those already here." Now, Steve, 1965, new immigration legislation and for four decades now, 90% of immigrants have come from non-European countries. This is the first time in American history that the majority of immigrants come from elsewhere than Europe. Is this a reasonable position to take that we need a breather to assimilate this new influx?

Steven Hayward: I go back and forth on this question. It seems to me that if you took a breather it might not change any of our problems if you don't change the deeper problem, which is the problem of assimilation today is a cultural problem, not a problem of numbers or what countries they come from. This country has always been very good at making Americans out of people from diverse countries and traditions--people from the Balkans in the last century--early in the last century for example--the doctrines of multi-culturalism and affirmative action and cultural liberalism are the heart of the problem. I mean, they ruin Americans as well as immigrants. And so, I tend to disagree with them in the main that the problem is simply the sheer number or that an immigration pause will change that.

Peter Robinson: What I want to know is is this a real fault line between paleo-conservatives and neo-conservatives? You'd agree with every word he just spoke, wouldn't you?

Taki Theodoracopulos: I agree with every word that Steven said because multiculturalism--when I came to this country I didn't speak a word of English.

Peter Robinson: And when did you come?

Taki Theodoracopulos: 1948, but as...

Peter Robinson: You were a child.

Taki Theodoracopulos: I was a child and I didn't come over as an immigrant. Anyway, I once made a crack and said I came over in my father's yacht, but nevertheless, immediately I was sent to Lawrenceville, I spoke no English, but I learned how to tackle low, I learned not to wear Plus Fours, which we wore in Europe at the time, and within three months, I had become an American, learned every American tradition. I did not come and join the Greek community and insist that Americans become Greek. Don't forget, I agree with everything that Steven said, but there's a million immigrants coming in every year and there is close to 9 million illegals, 8.7 to be exact, $64 billion are spent on legal and illegals.

Peter Robinson: So you do insist that you want to shut down the borders for...

Taki Theodoracopulos: Five-year moratorium, I would say.

Peter Robinson: Okay, does that strike you as outrageous? How deep is that disagreement?

Steven Hayward: Well not outrageous, but I just don't--well first of all, it's very difficult to police our borders without sending our army there. And I don't think anyone is going to do that anytime soon. I just don't think it would make that much difference. The illegal immigrants are still going to come and the ones who are already here, what's going to happen to them in the meantime? It's the wrong fight, it seems to me the other fight is the one we ought to have.

Peter Robinson: Okay, the two of you have been very congenial about it, but as I read the magazines, people are hurling bricks at each other over this issue of immigration. Now let me suggest one reason possibly why. Samuel Francis, again writing in your magazine Taki, theAmerican Conservative, he's reviewing a book, he writes, "America was intended--" he puts this forward as the paleo-conservative view--"America was intended by the Founding Fathers to be an Anglo Saxon Celtic Nation." The problem is that the way the paleo-conservatives frame the argument comes extremely close to laying down racial qualifications for immigrants and that is flatly unacceptable to the neo-cons as to large elements of...

Taki Theodoracopulos: Well, even to us. My answer to that is Samuel Francis does not speak for the editorial board. I personally think that it would be nice to have some more Europeans coming in because it was after all a European nation, but I'm very open about it. I can understand--in the hotel I was staying here, everybody was Spanish speaking and I could understand these people need jobs and I'm very happy that we do take them in because--but at the same time, we cannot become Brazil.

Peter Robinson: Next on The American Conservative agenda, worries about globalization.

Title: Making a Protection Racket

Peter Robinson: The American Conservative magazine's mission statement, "We will question the benefits and point to the pitfalls of the global free trade economy." And your fellow editor Pat Buchanan ran for president three times on a protectionist ticket.

Taki Theodoracopulos: On a protectionistic...

Peter Robinson: So, the paleo-conservative position is protectionist?

Taki Theodoracopulos: I do feel very sad when you see Bethlehem Steel, whose President we raced against sailing in the '50s, Bethlehem Steel was one of the great giants and now to see these people. You know, people used to go, grandsons, great grandsons, straight into the business. All those wonderful John O'Hara books, everything was based on big businesses which kept the thing going--no longer. To support sweatshops so Nike can make a fortune here, in Vietnam, I'm not for. I believe in protection for American workers.

Peter Robinson: Steve?

Steven Hayward: We're dancing around on all these issues; I think the core of the problem...

Peter Robinson: Go to the core.

Steven Hayward: The core of the issue, which is both on immigration and on the idea of trade and globalization and all the rest. What's lurking in the background is an understanding of what kind of country America should be or ought to be in people's opinion. And in some respects, we'll get into I suspect the arguments over American empire...

Peter Robinson: That's next, go right ahead.

Steven Hayward: Well, maybe I anticipated too much, but in some respects the argument we're having now looks in substance and in form very similar to the argument that went on in Britain at the end of the 19th century between the Little Englanders, who didn't like the empire, and the great--the imperialists who wanted to keep it going and so forth. And I mean one of Pat's phrases is, America is a republic not an empire. He tries to, although the distinction is not entirely clear in my mind.

Peter Robinson: Actually hold on there, hold on there--let's just go right on to this--so let me set it up with this mission statement, and the last quotation from the mission statement since we're getting on to this republic and not an empire--"We, the editors of the American Conservative, we will turn a critical eye on those who favor go-it-alone militarism where America threatens and bombs one nation after another while the world looks on in increasing horror." Okay, back to you. That's the Little England point of view, the Little America point of view, so to speak.

Steven Hayward: Well, I mean there's several parts to this--one part of it is, we can sit around in our parlors and talk about--as the Founders did--I mean there were some people who argued against an American Confederation in 1787 saying we ought to have a Christian Sparta and look inward, where others have said, we're going to have an empire of liberty, that was the phrase that was used by the Founders and their successors. See. So, but the point is in a globalized, interconnected world we have now, as a historical matter, America is going to have to lead the world or there's going to be a lot more chaos. Now, you can have all kinds of reasonable arguments about what makes sense, what's prudent and what's not prudent, we'll make lots of mistakes, but American withdrawal from the world is just not realistic. We're going to lead it because we're the biggest player in the world, just as Europe was for 500 years, just as Greece and Rome were 2,000 years ago.

Peter Robinson: Niall Ferguson has a new book out now in which he clearly--wonderful book, from your lips, wonderful book...

Taki Theodoracopulos: I happen to be the godfather of his daughter.

Peter Robinson: Oh do you? In which Niall argues that for all its faults, the British Empire spread capitalism, liberal values, that India was a poor country when the British went into it, it was still a poor country when they left...

Taki Theodoracopulos: That is very true.

Peter Robinson: ...it was very much less poor; it was an instrument on balance for good in the world.

Taki Theodoracopulos: But, nevertheless, in Empire, Niall points out also that what the Belgians left behind and what the French left behind in the Congo we're still reaping the benefits. The most ungovernable--it is hell on earth. This is not...

Peter Robinson: The Belgian Empire in the Congo?

Taki Theodoracopulos: The Belgian and the French, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and all those--even ours, Liberia, look what's happened in Liberia, this was our baby. So India was lucky because it got the English but still it's the Indians who did it.

Peter Robinson: So let me put the neo-con point to you--it is simply the case that the United States is overwhelmingly the richest and most powerful country on earth and it has fallen to us to enforce peace, to spread liberal values...

Taki Theodoracopulos: I totally disagree.

Peter Robinson: ...and if we don't, the world will be a messier, uglier, poorer place, and sooner or later we will be a messier, poorer, uglier country.

Taki Theodoracopulos: I don't agree at all with you, Peter. We're not saying to be isolationist, maybe Pat says it, I don't say it and I don't think Pat says it any longer. I'm just saying we cannot go around in alien cultures imposing democracy.

Peter Robinson: You oppose the war in Iraq?

Taki Theodoracopulos: Absolutely. The first war of America that I've ever opposed.

Peter Robinson: Let me press Taki on this paleo-conservative opposition to the war in Iraq.

Title: Bang the (War) Drum Slowly

Peter Robinson: The war is over, it was quick, there were very few casualties, even civilian casualties--it was hard to get firm numbers but it looks as though there were fewer killed in this war than died in a month under Saddam Hussein from hunger. We're discovering mass graves, people let out of prisons, it was a filthy, rotten mess. Haven't, as we tape this, discovered any obvious weapons of mass destruction, but there are hints that there were some here, do you still oppose that war?

Taki Theodoracopulos: I oppose this war for the following reasons--first of all the big lie was that they have nuclear bombs, they were threatening America, this was like Greece threatening America in 1948. Come on, this is a joke. (cool.gif I still believe very much as a father and we're all fathers at this table, losing a child is so horrible that we went in there and more innocent people were killed much less because America was not out to kill a population. Of course, they did it brilliantly--I predicted two weeks and Saddam dying in the rubble, it took three weeks, I'm very happy it happened this way. But no, because the next thing you do is why didn't we attack Mugabe? Mugabe starved half the population in Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia as it was called. He's a much bigger monster. Are we going to start measuring how big monsters are? I'm very happy by the way that they got rid of him, but I was against the war and I still am.

Steven Hayward: This whole argument between paleo-cons and neo-cons long predates the most recent war.

Peter Robinson: Right, but it's a pretty good example to chew on.

Steven Hayward: A phrase from John Quincy Adams that I'm sure that Pat Buchanan and others of the American Conservative likes is when he said, "America is a friend of liberty everywhere but a defender only of our own." Now the question during the Cold War...

Peter Robinson: We do not go in search of monsters to destroy...

Steven Hayward: Now, one of the questions during the Cold War and I think it's the same question now in a different form, is does the defense of American liberty begin on the Rhine River? That was the great question about NATO and there were a few conservatives, especially some of the older, I would say pre-paleo conservatives of the '50s and '40s like Bob Taft and so forth, who said no, I didn't agree with that then, I don't agree with it now. The question now about the Middle East, I've had long arguments about this and the broader phenomenon of terrorism in Islam, is can the United States tolerate the deep instability of that region or are we going to have to do something about it? And that becomes a prudential argument. Mugabe, I completely agree, I wouldn't mind knocking that guy over, but we don't go out searching for monsters to destroy. Mugabe is not implicated in I think the way Iraq can be implicated least circumstantially if not more so as being a great part of a large part that we cannot tolerate.

Taki Theodoracopulos: All right, I agree with what Steven said, but you know that the problem can be solved overnight if America imposes its will on Israel.

Peter Robinson: Israel. Now that Taki's brought it up, there's something we have to address.

Title: A Bone to AIPAC

Peter Robinson: Pat Buchanan, "We charge,"--you let me know whether by that "we" he includes you...

Taki Theodoracopulos: Yes he does.

Peter Robinson: "We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interest. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars on an assumption that somehow what's good for Israel is good for America." Now, we've got a couple of issues here. One is, just the foreign policy analysis. The other is, it has to be raised, that the American Conservative, Pat in particular, is often accused of anti-Semitism.

Taki Theodoracopulos: He's often been accused.

Peter Robinson: Let's take them both on. Steve?

Steven Hayward: It seems to me this--I like to be charitable when I can--it seems to me this is unfortunate...

Peter Robinson: Go ahead.

Steven Hayward: The way this falls out is, Pat uses language like cabal, the left by the way uses the same language--a conspiracy, mostly when you say neo-conservative that's often a euphemism for somebody who's Jewish, even though many prominent neo-conservatives aren't.

Peter Robinson: Bill Bennett, Gene Kirkpatrick...

Steven Hayward: Michel Novak, the Catholic theologian. Right. Okay. And then the return fire from the other side, what gets in the New York Times and elsewhere as well, there's anti-Semitism behind all that. And this distracts us completely from the nature of the argument, which Taki just raised in a very reasonable form I think. Now, I have a lot to say about this--I take the heterodox view, oddly enough, that most of the Arab regimes there want the status quo with Israel to continue for the very simple reason that--the existence of Israel and its alliance with the United States is a way to channel the frustrations and discontent of their own people.

Taki Theodoracopulos: Oh sure.

Steven Hayward: And if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, the region would probably be in worse shape and/or it would have to pivot even more fully to anti-Americanism. And one of the problems you see all around the world, I mean there's anti-Americanism in areas far remote from the Middle East and part of what it is is people are resentful about McDonalds, they're resentful about, just that Americans dominate the globe. And that sort of thing goes on...

Taki Theodoracopulos: That is to be expected.

Peter Robinson: Okay can I--Taki, we just have to deal with this. You have said you believe in Israel's right to exist, Pat Buchanan has said the same thing, absolutely no question about it, but you make the point that Israel's interest and American interests do not always coincide...

Taki Theodoracopulos: Are not necessarily the same.

Peter Robinson: ...or do not always coincide and that when our interests differ from theirs we should put our interest first. Now that strikes me as pretty reasonable. However, you've got Pat saying stuff like this--he writes, again in your magazine, you're co-editor, in other words, you're associated with this stuff in one way or another. Pat wrote not long ago that for neo-conservatives it is a matter of, I quote him, "One nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud." Now that is an obvious play on the Nazi slogan, "Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer."

[Talking at the same time]

Peter Robinson: That's vile, don't you want to disassociate yourself from that?

Taki Theodoracopulos: Hang on. He's obviously being provocative--I can see him laughing when he wrote it. Now, we're not in a state of war that we cannot even--I was reading something on the plane yesterday coming here, the moment you say anything, you can't even make a joke, you are charged with anti-Semitism. There is a letter sent by, as he called them, a cabal of intellectuals who sent a letter to the President of the United States saying you are either going to do this or otherwise we will treat you as an anti-Semite. That letter exists, it was sent, it was published in the American Conservative. Now, since when does anybody accuse the President of the United States unless you do what we tell you you're going to be called an anti-Semite?

Peter Robinson: But here you have Steve Hayward at the American Enterprise Institute struggling to put the most charitable construction, trying to construct you for our viewers here as a reasonable man making reasonable points, wouldn't life be easier if you said to Pat knock it off, you're offending people needlessly. Don't talk about cabals, which is a word with a Hebrew root, which Pat Buchanan who knows words knows very well...

Taki Theodoracopulos: I don't even know what cabal means--I mean, I know what it means, I didn't know oit was Hebrew.

Peter Robinson: And then this thing about playing on Nazi slogans, I mean just slap him around a little bit Taki.

Taki Theodoracopulos: He's my superior, meaning intellectual superior. He's run for President three times...

Peter Robinson: That crosses the line, no?

Steven Hayward: Well I think so. But we are talking about him right? Taki's right, he does this on purpose.

Peter Robinson: Last topic, I've known Taki for 20 years, when did he become such a pessimist?

Title: Backs to the Future

Peter Robinson: You write in a recent issue of theAmerican Conservative, it's a column entitled "Professor Taki's Reading List"--"So what books should our President be reading? I'd start with The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler. The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington is a nice antidote to all the absurd euphoria about the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy. The Golden Age by Gore Vidal is a wonderfully nostalgic look at pre-1941 America." The West in decline, our hopes for democracy and free markets in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, a mere chimera, and we should all be taking a longing look back at America of 65 years ago. You personally are a man of unbounded optimism, good humor, patriotism, why are you suddenly sounding like a curmudgeon? What about Ronald Reagan, what about the smiling face of conservatism? What about buoyancy and hopes about America?

Taki Theodoracopulos: We are being cautious, we're not being pessimistic. We just think that America is overreaching.

Steven Hayward: If you had handed that reading list to Ronald Reagan, he would have handed it back and said, you've got to be kidding. By the way, you know, Henry Kissinger persuaded Richard Nixon to read The Decline of the Westand of course what came out of all that was détente, because Kissinger thought, you know, America is on the way down...

Peter Robinson: We're losing, we can only bargain for time.

Steven Hayward: This is why, I think the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, which is neither camp really, is a very different animal--is the kind I think we should get back. That's the kind I associate...

Taki Theodoracopulos: Well you should know, you wrote the definitive book on it. But I actually think that we are overreaching as I said and I think that America, as Pat says, is a republic and I think American people don't want downtown Chicago to be like downtown Tel Aviv--people looking for terrorist bombers and all this. We don't want to turn America into an armed camp which will be, if we continue to impose our--don't think that Baghdad is finished and I wish it were and don't think that anybody in the American Conservative is praying for defeat, we're praying for victory and for peace. But they're not going to have peace there.

Steven Hayward: I find it ironic that the American Conservative is called the American Conservative. It's not really clear what it is they want to conserve about America now. In fact they want to restore, I think a country that never existed.

Peter Robinson: Give me two or three sentences on what you would like Taki and Pat Buchanan to do to correct their position. If you get two or three sentences in which to change paleo-con thinking, what would you tell them?

Steven Hayward: One, I'd understand what actually all conservatives, paleo, neo, and otherwise, have in common--they have a great skepticism of rationalism and social engineering, a great regard for religion and its importance in our society, skepticism or opposition to the way the Supreme Court is out of control and has been for 30, 40 years. The visions are quite clear, so I'd understand those similarities. The second thing I would say is think through what I was just remarking about, what is it about America that actually we want to conserve? Or actually are you quite radical in wanting to restore some earlier version of the country? We have two different visions of America...

Peter Robinson: Taki, closing argument. What would you say to Steve to persuade him to become a paleo-con?

Taki Theodoracopulos: Oh, I think Steve knows too much to be persuaded by me, but--and I'm not trying to pay you a compliment. I would just say to Steven ask your friends, the so-called neo-cons, to practice a little bit more Christian values. In other words, you don't have to--they're tremendous haters. Conservatives were never haters. They say unless you're with us, you're against us. They say unless you agree with everything we say, you are out of line. And I think if they are real conservatives, which I don't believe they are, I think they are careerists, then they should just accept us for maybe having a difference of opinion the way we accept them. They control everything, they control the Weekly Standard, they control the National Review, they control the Wall Street Journal, they control meaning. So...

Peter Robinson: The man who came to America on a yacht feels oppressed.

Taki Theodoracopulos: Oh I don't feel oppressed at all. I just want to be able to return on my yacht without having to have bodyguards. I'm just joking.

Peter Robinson: Taki Theodoracopulos, Steve Hayward, thank you very much. I'm Peter Robinson, for Uncommon Knowledge, thanks for joining us.

American Conservatism 1945-1995
By Irving Kristol


The Public Interest was born well before the term "neoconservative" was invented, and will–I trust–be alive and active when the term is of only historical interest. That time may even be now, as the distinction between conservative and neoconservative has been blurred almost beyond recognition. Still, the distinction has not yet been entirely extinguished–it still turns up when Jeane Kirkpatrick's views on foreign policy are mentioned–so this may be a suitable moment to look back and define the role that neoconservatism, and The Public Interest specifically, has played in the history of American conservatism since the end of World War II. (A quite different, but equally useful, essay could be written on its role in the history of postwar liberalism.)
In that half-century, as I see it, American conservatism has gone through three stages.

First there was the renewal of what might be called traditional conservatism, centered around William F. Buckley's National Review and having the goal of reprogramming the Republican party into a solidly conservative political instrument. This led to the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the ensuing electoral debacle. That debacle, however, had the result of consolidating and expanding conservative influence within the Republican party. This is not as paradoxical as it appears. After all, the comparable debacle of McGovern‚s defeat in 1972 resulted in the left wing of American liberalism, whose candidate he was, gaining effective control of the Democratic party. Inner-party dynamics can be far more important than election results, on which the media and public attention naturally focus.

Second, there was the influence of the neoconservative impulse. Originally, this impulse looked to the Democratic party for political expression, but by the mid-1970s that was obviously an expectation difficult to sustain, and a gradual, often reluctant, shift toward the Republican party got under way. (There are still quite a few Democratic neoconservatives, most of whom by now quietly vote Republican.) The Public Interest was the focal point of this neoconservative impulse, though much of its impact was the result of its influence on the younger men and women who were ensconced in the editorial and "op-ed" departments of the Wall Street Journal. Neoconservatism differed in many important respects from traditional conservatism, but had no program of its own. Basically, it wanted the Republican party to cease playing defensive politics, to be forward-looking rather than backward-looking. Some of us actually dared to suggest that the party should be more "ideological," although "ideology" is not a term pleasing to American ears. In the end, the notion of an activist "agenda" has become ever more integral to Republican political thinking, doing the work of "ideology" though in a peculiarly pragmatic American way. The substance of any specific agenda may not have much to do with neoconservatism, but the moving spirit does.

Third, there has been the emergence, over the past decades, of religion-based, morally concerned, political conservatism. In the long run, this may be the most important of all. Though the media persist in portraying the religious conservatives as aggressive fanatics, in fact their motivation has been primarily defensive–a reaction against the popular counterculture, against the doctrinaire secularism of the Supreme Court, and against a government that taxes them heavily while removing all traces of morality and religion from public education, for example, even as it subsidizes all sorts of activities and programs that are outrages against traditional morality. The religious faith behind this reaction has been steadily gaining in both intensity and popularity, especially among Protestant evangelicals, and may well now have a dynamism of its own. It is not at all unimaginable that the United States is headed for a bitter and sustained Kulturkampf that could overwhelm conventional notions of what is and what is not political.

Let me look at the evolution of postwar conservatism from the perspective of a neoconservative.

II
When National Review was founded in 1955, I regarded it as an eccentricity on the ideological landscape, it seemed so completely out of phase. Essentially it continued the polemic against the New Deal that characterized American conservatism, as represented by the Republican party, throughout the 1930s and 1940s. As a child of the depression who was outraged at the spectacle of idle factories, unused resources, and vast unemployment all coexisting, I could not take seriously the seemingly blind faith in "free enterprise" that was the primal certainty of National Review. I simply found this point of view irrelevant. So did practically everyone else at the time–at least the "everyone else" I knew or read.

To some aspects of the conservative message I was certainly vulnerable, even then. Though a liberal, I had never been enamored with those beliefs that constituted an orthodox liberal outlook. Thus, I had always been in favor of capital punishment. I never believed that criminality could be "cured" by therapeutic treatment. I never doubted that school prayer was a perfectly sensible idea. I was convinced that the "basics rote learning and memorization" offered the young the best opportunity for learning. I thought that "sexual permissiveness," in all its guises, was an absurd idea. I regarded the ideal of a "world without war" as utopian, and "making the world safe for democracy" a futile enterprise. So I could honestly say that I would welcome the appearance of a conservative magazine–a magazine that was reflective (in the Burke-Tocqueville tradition), one that would help refine and elevate public discourse. What I meant, I now suspect, was that I would welcome a conservative magazine that was not overly offensive to liberal sensibilities, a magazine that did not aim to destroy liberalism but to complement it.

National Review was certainly not that. It was brash, even vulgar in its antiliberal polemics. There was something collegiate–sophomoric, to be blunt–about its high-spiritedness, and its general tone was anti-intellectual. Above all, it seemed to me simple-minded in its "anti-statism" in general and its contempt for all social reforms in particular. There is little doubt that its "anti-statism" revivified, for a lot of people, even younger people, the dormant nerves of anti-New Deal fervor. Ten years earlier, the popularity of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom had already signified the possibility of such a revival. But I had not read that book, and though I have come to admire his later writings in political philosophy and intellectual history, I still haven't read it. The reason is that I did not believe for a moment that the American people would allow themselves to be seduced or coerced along any such path. I deemed that kind of "anti-statism" to be a species of political hysteria, and I felt its reaction to the New Deal excessive. So I did not take National Review seriously as a political journal.

Which, it turns out, was a mistake–the kind of mistake that intellectuals are especially prone to make in politics. We say, repeatedly, that ideas have consequences, which is true but what we have in mind are complex, thoughtful, and well-articulated ideas. What we so easily overlook is the fact that simple ideas, allied to passion and organization, also have consequences. National Review, it turns out, was part of a larger movement that created institutions which shaped and trained several thousand young conservatives, not so much to go forth and proclaim the gospel, as to go into the Republican party and gain control of it. This they did, most effectively, over the next decade. The result was that it was Goldwater, and not Nelson Rockefeller, who was the Republican party's nominee in 1964. Nor did Goldwater's defeat change the reality that liberal Republicanism had suffered a mortal wound and the Eastern, „establishment‰ wing of the party had yielded dominance to the conservative wing. The Nixon years were a troubled time of transition, and for the younger conservatives in that administration it was a disaster. But the course had been set. It was the National Review idol Ronald Reagan who won the nomination in 1980, and today–despite the George Bush interregnum–the Republican party is unquestionably a conservative party. But what kind of conservative party? Much has happened since those early years in the 1950s, and the conservatism of National Review has largely been reshaped by the emergence of new currents of conservative thought.

III
One such current was what came to be called "neoconservatism," and its origins can be traced to the founding of The Public Interest 30 years ago. Not that the founders of this journal had any such political goal. We were all liberals, of a kind, in 1965. But it turned out that most of us were the kind of liberals who were destined to play a role in the conservative revival.

The dozen or so scholars and intellectuals who were the nucleus of the new venture were in a state of dissatisfaction with the liberal temper of the age. But at that time, the conservatism of National Review interested us not at all. There were many points of repulsion but it was NRs primordial (as we saw it) hostility to the New Deal that created a gulf between us and them. We were all children of the depression, most of us from lower-middle-class or working-class families, a significant number of us urban Jews for whom the 1930s had been years of desperation, and we felt a measure of loyalty to the spirit of the New Deal if not to all its programs and policies. Nor did we see it as representing any kind of „statist‰ or socialist threat to the American democracy. As James Q. Wilson, one of the "founding fathers," recently wrote in the New Republic (May 22, 1995):

American liberalism, like America in general, is different. Created by the New Deal but drawing on features of the earlier Progressive movement, liberalism here, unlike the liberalism found in many European nations, never took seriously the idea of nationalizing major industries, only occasionally and then without much conviction proposed any major distribution of income, and merely flirted with centralized economic planning. A welfare state was created, but compared to the welfare state in many other industrialized nations, the American version offered less generous benefits to the unemployed, provided no children‚s allowances and restricted tax-supported medical care to veterans, the elderly and the very poor.
All of us had ideas on how to improve, even reconstruct, this welfare state˜we were meliorists, not opponents, and only measured critics. It was when the Great Society programs were launched that we began to distance ourselves, slowly and reluctantly, from the newest version of official liberalism.

But it was not only the Great Society that affected us. The Zeitgeist of the 1960s was, in retrospect, really quite bizarre. "Automation," for instance, was a prime bogeyman, as was the corollary prospect of a "push-button society" in which workers would experience a surfeit of leisure they were not equipped to handle. The Ford Foundation and other trendy institutions had many conferences and sponsored many books on "the problem of leisure," while Lyndon Johnson appointed a Commission on Automation. Fortunately, Daniel Bell was on that commission and, together with Robert Solow of M.I.T., he composed a sensible report. This experience with the Automation-Leisure scare moved Dan Bell and myself to contemplate the founding of this magazine. Someone, we felt, had to continue talking modest sense, even if grandiose nonsense was temporarily so very popular.

The tone of The Public Interest, from the outset, was skeptical, pragmatic, meliorist. We were especially provoked by the widespread acceptance of left-wing sociological ideas that were incorporated in the War on Poverty. The most egregious such idea was the Community Action Program, which would mobilize the urban poor, especially the black poor, to "fight city hall," literally. The prescribed cure for poverty was defined as militant political action, even revolutionary political action, that would result in the redistribution of income and wealth. This idea, spawned by the Jacobins in the French Revolution, has probably been the most popular and pernicious belief of the past two centuries, distorting expectations and destroying the economies of many a Third World country. We at The Public Interest, having known poverty at first hand–the authors of the War on Poverty were mainly upper-middle-class types–and witnessing the ways poverty was overcome in reality, by gradual economic growth with the concomitant growth of economic opportunity, were utterly contemptuous of this idea. And our attitude had surprising echoes in unexpected places.

The reason was that most of us were social scientists, and as Pat Moynihan put it, the best use of social science is to refute false social science. Since we live in an age when "experts" are overvalued, the social science in The Public Interest had its effect. Actually, one could have reached the same, sound conclusions from the study of history, or even just looking, not at people mired in poverty, but at those poor people who had managed to move out of poverty–people who were all around us. But that‚s not the kind of testimony that Congressional committees and the media were looking for.

As The Public Interest continued on its modest way, at first with a circulation of 2,000 to 3,000, all sorts of portentous things were happening around us–which made us feel, and made us appear to be, more conservative than we had anticipated. One was the student rebellion of the late 1960s, a rebellion aimed primarily at the liberal professoriate–the small minority of conservative professors were largely ignored. This assault reminded many liberal professors that their liberalism had implicit limits, beyond which lay some quite conservative assumptions about the nature of authority in general, and in a university in particular. There is nothing like the utopian idiocies of the extreme left–the "infantile" left, as Lenin called it–to stir thoughts of moderation among the centrist majority. And from such thoughts of moderation, some second thoughts about the implications of moderation are bound to develop, and these second thoughts will always, in that context or that situation, turn out to involve a conservative modification of the original liberalism.

The student rebellion had, of course, close ties with the emerging counterculture, which set out to scandalize and delegitimize the regnant liberalism in its own bold and brash way. Liberal professors and liberal intellectuals liked, at that time, to think of themselves as "broad-minded," but they were nevertheless shocked. It‚s one thing to give scholarly approval to historical, sociological, and psychological studies that demonstrated our conventional family structure to be less universal, more "culture bound," than one had realized. It is quite another thing to see one's children enticed into sexual promiscuity, drugs, and suicide. The liberal professoriate, and many members of the intellectual community, had always kept its distance from "bourgeois society," and always tried to be "objective" about bourgeois mores. Now, a great many discovered, albeit reluctantly, that they had been bourgeois all along.

Soon, The Public Interest no longer stood alone. Commentary, which had for some years flirted with the left, veered sharply in a neoconservative direction. Even more important was the arrival of Robert Bartley as editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. He quickly melded the familiar anti-statist views of the Journal with the neoconservative critique of contemporary liberalism. This trio of publications suddenly became something like a national force, and politicians and editorial writers began to pay attention.

What kind of force was it? It is not easy, even in retrospect, to answer that question in a crisp and clear way. I would say that there were three distinctive aspects to the neoconservative "movement" (a rather grandiose term, given its modest dimensions). First, the political tonality was different. This was surely the result of our liberal heritage, which predisposed us to be forward-looking, not in any sense dour and reactionary. I once remarked, semi-facetiously, that to be a neoconservative one had to be of a cheerful disposition, no matter how depressing the current outlook. In America all successful politics is the politics of hope, a mood not noticeable in traditional American conservatism. The way to win, in politics as in sport, is to think of yourself as a winner. The pathos of being proved right, while losing, is always a great temptation to a conservative minority in opposition.

Secondly, it follows that our natural impulse was melioristic. From the outset, I was mindful of the injunction of my first editor at Commentary, Elliot Cohen, that you can't beat a horse with no horse. Even while being critical of the Great Society, The Public Interest was always interested in proposing alternate reforms, alternate legislation, that would achieve the desired aims more securely, and without the downside effects. This was something that did not much interest traditional conservatism, with its emphatic "anti-statist" focus. The difference also had something to do with the fact that traditional conservatives had many distinguished economists in their ranks, and economics is above all the science of limits, a great nay-saying enterprise. Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists. (They came later, as we "matured.") This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority, so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.

Thirdly, neoconservatives–at least the New Yorkers among them–came out of an intellectual milieu, in which some large ideas–i.e., ideas with a philosophic or ideological dimension–were taken very seriously. This was of little significance in the early years of neoconservatism, but it did become very important as the nation found itself in a third stage of postwar conservative history, a stage in which religious conservatism became an active force in American politics.

IV
Active religion-based conservatism did not become a political force in the United States because of either religion or conservatism. Its activism was provoked by militant liberalism and the militant secularism associated with it. This liberalism and this secularism, in the postwar years, came to dominate the Democratic party, the educational establishment, the media, the law schools, the judiciary, the major schools of divinity, the bishops of the Catholic Church, and the bureaucracies of the "mainline" Protestant denominations. One day, so to speak, millions of American Christians–most of them, as it happens, registered Democrats–came to the realization that they were institutionally isolated and impotent. They quite naturally wanted their children to be raised as well-behaved Christians but discovered that their authority over their own children had been subverted and usurped by an aggressive, secular liberalism that now dominated our public education system and our popular culture. They looked at our high schools and saw that gay and lesbian organizations were free to distribute their literature to the students but that religious organizations were not. They saw condoms being distributed to adolescent teenagers while the Supreme Court forbade the posting of the Ten Commandments on the classroom wall. And so they rebelled and did the only thing left for them to do–they began to organize politically. In so doing they may very well have initiated a sea-change in American politics and American life.

Inevitably, the conservative Christians began to seek links with traditional conservatives, since they shared common enemies–liberal government, a left-liberal educational establishment, a judiciary besotted with liberal dogmas. But this alliance worked smoothly only up to a point. The trouble with traditional conservatism, especially those segments dominated by a purely economic conservatism, was that it tended to be libertarian and even secular-minded when it came to the kinds of moral and social issues that agitated Christian conservatives. There is an important difference between the kind of "liberty" dear to the hearts of economic conservatives and leaders of the business community, and the "ordered liberty" that any serious religion would have in mind. This contradiction became obvious in Ronald Reagan's appointees to the Federal Communications Commission, men who were enthusiastic about deregulation but indifferent about opening the doors to pornography. That same contradiction is today glaringly obvious within the Republican party, which economic conservatives have dominated ever since the post-Civil War period.

Oddly enough, the Christian conservatives found it easier to get along with the neoconservatives, many of whom come from an intellectual background and an intellectual milieu that is more concerned with criticizing liberalism than with criticizing "statism." It was primarily the neoconservative criticism of welfare for corrupting the souls of its recipients, as against the traditional conservative emphasis on the waste of taxpayers‚ money, that helped make welfare reform a major issue for religious conservatives. Similarly, the troubled condition of the modern family was a concern of both secular neoconservatives and Christian conservatives, before it became a popular conservative topic. Not that this now matters all that much, since the merger of neoconservatism and traditional conservatism, underway since the election of Ronald Reagan, is largely complete. Even the term, "neoconservative," is not much used, "conservative" now having stretched its meaning to be more inclusive. But today's traditional, libertarian, economically focused conservatives are still strong enough to win local or state-wide elections and to dominate the United States Senate. This is a source of constant irritation to Christian conservatives.

So the assimilation of Christian conservatives into American conservatism is still in its relatively early stages, and it is creating serious tensions. To some degree, this is because Christian conservatism is a "movement," not simply a political party, and like all movements of this kind it has its various factions, some of whom are more committed to demonstrating the steadfastness of their Christian faith than to exercising political influence. To some degree, too, the secular temper of the business community–not densely populated by Bible-reading types–has a powerful grip on the Republican political imagination, as well as on its finances. It is even possible that Christian conservatism will fragment into new political parties. The conventional political wisdom, wedded to our two-party system, would assume that this would mark the political demise of Christian conservatism. That is possible. But it is also possible that the two-party system, however deeply rooted in our history, is not going to be with us forever.

In any case, I think it is probably an error to focus so narrowly on the role of Christian conservatism in American politics. The born-again Christian impulse is, above all, a religious impulse that looks well beyond any political horizon. It is my sense that this impulse will grow in the years ahead, whatever the political fortunes or misfortunes of Christian political conservatism. We have lived through a century of ever more extreme hedonism, antinomianism, personal and sexual individualism, licentiousness (as it used to be called), and no one who has bothered to read a bit of history ought to be surprised if it culminates in some kind of aggressive religious awakening. So the rise of Christian political conservatism may turn out to be a prelude to something far more important, involving the place of religion in American life, including American public life. Just what form this renewed religious impulse will take no one can foresee. We–all of us–could be in for some shocking surprises.

Irving Kristol is co-editor of The Public Interest