Cain's Pain: A Three-Minute History of Neoconservatism

Herman Cain recently said he was not terribly familiar with neoconservatism.  For a serious presidential candidate, this frankly was not impressive.  Then, again, one might fairly grant that the term has been conceived in different ways over the last nearly five decades, with at least one definition used more as an indictment than a description. One might also grant that only folks who type for a living—not successful captains of industry—generally have the time to keep track and decipher such matters. 

With that as a critical but simultaneously self-effacing introduction, you might be interested in the paragraphs below, as they are drawn from an essay I wrote in 2005.  I had been asked by a St. Paul-based group of retired business, political, academic and other leaders called Mindstretch to talk about the history of the conservative movement in Minnesota and the nation—and keep it under an hour.  Here’s the section on neoconservatism. 

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A significantly different strain of conservatism [as opposed to “paleoconservatism”], tagged “neoconservatism,” emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.  While few of the so-called neoconservatives of the period ever seemed to welcome the label, it was a more helpful than confusing one.  

[N]eoconservatism is associated with the intellectuals who either started or were soon-after involved with The Public Interest, which started in 1965.  People like Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Pat Moynihan, and James Q. Wilson.  Men and some women, more precisely, who were old-time liberals and even quite leftist in their youth; disproportionately Jewish and originally from New York; and social scientists by profession.  According to Irving Kristol (the chief editor), they had no real affinity for National Review’s approach to conservatism, which they saw as too anti-New Deal.  Still, they had grown increasingly skeptical of many of the assumptions that guided Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the War on Poverty.  They also were angered by what was happening on campuses at the time and what was happening in the culture more broadly.  “The Zeitgeist of the 1960s,” Kristol has written, “was, in retrospect, really quite bizarre.”  He also has been credited with this exquisite definition:  “A neoconservative is liberal mugged by reality.”

Roughly during this time, Norman Podhoretz, and, thereby, Commentary, the monthly magazine of political and cultural affairs he then edited, were also moving right.  It was in Commentary, for example, in 1979, that Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Georgetown University political scientist and Democrat, wrote her celebrated essay, “Dictatorships & Double Standards.”   Goes the story, the piece brought her to the attention of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who, not much more than a year later, named her U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.  Barely minutes after that, she was a full-fledged conservative folk hero.

Kirkpatrick wrote “Dictatorships & Double Standards” when many on the left viewed the United States as perhaps the greatest source of evil in the world instead of its greatest source of good.  (Much like now.)  In Iran, the Shah had just fallen, though Islamist radicals had not yet kidnapped scores of Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding them hostage until the very day, 444 days later, that Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter as president.  War was under way in Nicaragua between the seriously flawed but American-aligned Somoza regime and the Moscow- and Havana-backed Sandinistas.  The Soviets were expanding their reach and influence, not just in Central America, but also in the Caribbean, Afghanistan, South Africa, and the Horn of Africa.  All the while, according to Kirkpatrick, the United States, under the Carter administration, had “never tried so hard and failed so utterly to make and keep friends in the Third World.”  Here’s one quote from her essay:

Inconsistencies are a familiar part of politics in most societies.  Usually, however, governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with the national interest.  What makes the inconsistencies of the Carter administration noteworthy are, first, the administration’s moralism —which renders it especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy; and second, the administration’s predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States.  The administration’s conception of national interest borders on doublethink:  it finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s “true interests.”

Staying with foreign policy, a half-dozen years later in 1985, Irving Kristol once more – along with advisory board colleagues such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, and Harvard’s Samuel Huntington—started another journal, this one focusing on American foreign policy, called The National Interest.  Its editors described its purpose this way:  The National Interest will be characterized as conservative.  And so it is, though only in the sense that, these days, the assumptions from which it proceeds are more congenial to conservatives than to anyone else.  These assumptions are:

[T]he primary and overriding purpose of American foreign policy must be to defend and advance the national interest of the United States (an interest that encompasses the values and aspiration of the American people, as well as their security from external threat and their material well-being).

[For] better or worse, international politics remains essentially power politics, and that the efficacy of military power in the conduct of foreign policy remains undiminished.

[And] the Soviet Union constitutes the single greatest threat to America’s interests, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Kristol and his associates went on to write:  “As recently as two decades ago, there was a consensus on these assumptions.  Indeed, they were regarded as truisms.  Today they are not.  Over recent years each has been rejected or challenged.”  For instance, the idea of the “national interest” has been challenged in the name of allegedly higher goals such as “peace, world order, human rights, and the global abolition of poverty.”

A final word is needed on how the term neoconservative has taken on a more restricted meaning during the George W. Bush years.  The label, which initially had a mainly domestic quotient, is now used mostly in reference—rarely with admiration—to supporters of the president’s aggressive approach to fighting terror internationally.  People like Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Bill Kristol, the latter of whom doubles as Irving’s son and the editor of the influential magazine The Weekly Standard. 

The intellectual patron saint of the current, relatively younger wave of neoconservatives is often said to be Leo Strauss, a German-born political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s and who died in 1973.  Nasty critics say things such as this:  “Strauss believed that the essential truths about human society and history should be held by an elite, and withheld from others who lack the fortitude to deal with truth.  Society, Strauss thought, needs consoling lies.”

Less-conspiratorial observers say things such as this:  “The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm:  The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss . . . [Accusations like these] are nonsense, and in part vicious nonsense.  Yet the ideas that the accusations pervert are those of Strauss, and when those ideas are restored to their true shape they can be seen as articulating core neoconservative convictions.  Strauss was not an elitist – but he was a lover of excellence.”

Strauss has been influential, sure enough.  But put me with the non-cabalist crowd.