Semi-Daily Journal

Is the New Republic really neoconservative?

Overall, I would have pegged them as a bit more traditionally left of center on most issues. The cover stories of the past two issues ("What Would Woodrow Do?" and "The Worst Bush Tax Cut Yet") and others such as "The 9/10 President," etc. illustrate this both on foreign policy and domestic economic issues. (Of course, New Republic Senior Editor Lawrence F. Kaplan might fit the neocon description.)

I note this primarily because it seems as though the definition of "neoconservative" has different connotations than it did in the late '70s. A quick Internet search turned up the following definition from Max Boot: "But what the heck is a neocon anyway in 2003? A friend of mine suggests it means the kind of right-winger a liberal wouldn't be embarrassed to have over for cocktails. That's as good a definition as any, since the term has clearly come unmoored from its original meaning."

Are neocons "liberals mugged by reality" as Irving Kristol commented (noted by Boot in the same article)?

In that sense, are people like Paul Krugman neocons in a domestic policy sense? I wouldn't have thought so. Or is the term only applied to foreign policy and military affairs? Perhaps all of this stems from my simply not fully understanding what a neocon is.

At any rate, we need more of whatever it is that people like Paul Krugman are.

"Scared"? I don't detect much apprehension in the article. If Wolfowitz fudges and stretches the truth, isn't calling this article an expression of New Republic's fear much of the same?

maciej

The neo-cons are part of ancient history of the 1970s-1980s. Sidney Blumenthal describes the neo-com movement in his 1984 book

Rise of the Counter Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power

My interpretation is that the neo-cons started out as anti-Stalinist/ Trotskyite Socialists that feared the Soviet Union and believed that the US should actively oppose them. During the late 1970s and the rise of Reagan, they swung from far left to far right. The leaders were John Podheretz, Elliot Abrams, Irving Kristol and others. Wolfowitz and Perle fit in that group as well.

They have always been unabashed militarists in favor of nuke weapons, missile defense and other deterrents to the Soviets. Although they were a fringe intellectual group, they fit in well with Reagan Star Wars policies and Evil Empire themes.

Paul Krugman is probably best described as a progressive internationalist. Krugman's multilateralist views on foreign policy place him squarely at odds with the Neo-cons. Neo-cons are also internationalists but they are also militarists and more unilateralist in their view.

Correct me if I am wrong, but most of what I know is from reading Blumenthal.

The New Republic is neoliberal, not neoconservative. It just so happens that TNR sided with neoconservatives on Iraq. And yes, TNR did have (and still has) prominent neoconservative Andrew Sullivan as editor/writer.

But on the whole, TNR's views and tenor are opposite of the conservative movement in the US, be that paleo or neo.

TNR is certainly not neoconservative. It's not conservative. Yes, in the last fifteen years it's had two editors (Andrew Sullivan and Michael Kelly) and one senior writer (Fred Barnes) that can fairly be labeled as "conservatives". But Sullivan, for example, wasn't nearly so conservative then as he is now; Kelly was fired for being anti-Gore; and Barnes no longer writes for the magazine (and he was the token conservative when he did).

TNR's support of the Iraq war is the predictable result of several factors. TNR is, first and foremost, contrarian. It's always been interventionist. And it's always been deeply concerned with middle-East politics and issues involving Israel's security. Through the nineties, TNR agitated for an armed response to the Balkan crisis—that's an example of an issue that demonstrates that they're not "neoconservative". (The neocon view saw no strategic interest in intervening in that conflict.)

From an economics standpoint, for a while TNR could have been seen as "conservative" in their support of fiscal responsibility and market economics. This may make them conservative in comparison to The Nation, for example, but as we know this is now mainstream economic opinion. More importantly, TNR has always held this opinion.

The best way to understand TNR (and people like me—incidentally, out of disgust, I let my subscription lapse when Kelly was editor and Michael Kinsley's stewardship was for me TNR's heyday) is that they're moderate paleo-liberal. That is, they're liberal in mid-twentieth century terms, not progressive and not socialist. They're inclusive in the liberal tradition and so are suspicious (but not hostile) to identity politics. They favor market economics in the liberal tradition but temper it with a desire for social justice.

This is what liberalism once meant. In fact, the big three, old, weekly journals of political opinion: The National Review, The New Republic, and The Nation—all represent in some sense fossilized political opinion. They are all three very "paleo". However, since consensus has moved more to the right on economics and to the left on social issues, today TNR seems less fossilized than the other two and is closest to popular opinion.

Anyway, I don't know a rightist that doesn't think of TNR as a leftist rag, and a leftist that doesn't think of it as a rightist rag. What else is new? Still, TNR thinks of itself as liberal, but there's nothing more vicious than internecine fighting and denunciation.

None other than Patrick Buchanan, former Nixon speechwriter and GOP presidential candidate from the isolationist wing of the GOP considers TNR to be a Neo-con magazine.

http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html

As usual, Buchanan has a few choice words to describe the Neo-cons.

BTW- I am NOT a Buchanan supporter. I do not agree with Buchanan's ideology or all of his foreign policy prescriptions. The above is a glimpse at the rhetoric and infighting on the GOP right.

you know, an earlier commnet made me think:

just how far apart are "neoliberals" and "neoconservatives"? (though neoliberal seems to refer to economic ideology, neoconservative seems to refer to political/foreign policy ideology, so this is somewhat apples and oranges i suppose)

but aren't the two terms and types pretty complimentary? Aren't there a load of people who are both, or who are sympathetic to the positions of both? Isn't that the current CW position? Isnt TNR basically both?

opinions?

Bakho,

It serves Buchanan's purposes to label TNR as "neoconservative" because he is primarily playing the zionist card in general and in the context of current US interventionist policy. This is because even when TNR has been the most liberal in the last twenty-five years, it's still staunchly and loudly been a supporter of Israel. On this issue more than any other, it's vulnerable to being labeled "conservative". In this way it is closest to Commentary which says right on its web front page that "it takes a special interest in Jewish affairs".

Otherwise, though, TNR doesn't belong in the list that Buchanan presents. On almost all other issues than Iraq and Israel, TNR typically disagrees strongly with WSJ, TWS, NR, and (less so) Commentary. It bears repeating that TNR is socially liberal, which these other publications are not. And while Andrew Sullivan was relatively conservative when he edited TNR, the day that the WSJ or TWS or NR starts loudly advocating gay rights and gay marriage is the day that I'll celebrate. But it's unthinkable, and will remain unthinkable for some time.

Kristol and his magazine, The Weekly Standard, epitomize "neoconservatism" (and, in the view of someone like Buchanan, "Jewish-American conservativism").

At any rate, you can't use Pat Buchanan as a reliable authority on conservative politics since he has become something other than a conservative. He's closer to being a populist fascist, and he is definitely antisemitic. He really believed that his vision was the closest to the future of the Republican Party, but instead most of the party turned away from him with disgust...and to the left.

Finally, I'd like to repeat and agree with what Ryan Kreider wrote above: "Perhaps all of this stems from my simply not fully understanding what a neocon is." I'm no political scientist, nor a political taxonomist, but it's my feeling that this term is being thrown about a lot recently with very little understanding of its historical meaning or, really, much comprehension at all. It could mean many different things, and likely does, but the most accurate definition is probably to merely point at "The Weekly Standard".

Celine,

You asked: "just how far apart are 'neoliberals' and 'neoconservatives'? (though neoliberal seems to refer to economic ideology, neoconservative seems to refer to political/foreign policy ideology, so this is somewhat apples and oranges i suppose)"

Good point. But the defining difference is, I think, social values.

"but aren't the two terms and types pretty complimentary? Aren't there a load of people who are both, or who are sympathetic to the positions of both? Isn't that the current CW position? Isnt TNR basically both?"

I'm not sure what you mean by "complimentary". Neither "complimentary" nor "complementary" in your sentence seems to make a true statement. Well, hmm, I suppose that if you see this in your "apples versus oranges" idea above, then they could be complementary.

But I don't think they are. Again, on the basis of social issues. While on economic matters the water has become muddied and, (as far as I'm concerned) on foreign policy and interventionism there can't be an inherently liberal or conservative stance (by conventional definitions of those terms), on social/cultural matters there's still a pretty stark divide between left and right.

Again, I don't think that TNR is "neo" anything. Although I've become disenchanted by TNR, I still think of it and myself as "classically liberal". In all the ways in which TNR (and I) typically disagree with the contemporary left it is in areas in which TNR has held onto what are now considered archaic liberal positions. Liberalism was, pre-Vietnam, interventionist. It emphasized commonality over difference. It was universalist, not relativist. I mean, most of the people on the left no longer call themselves liberals—for many people on the left, in many places, "liberal" has negative connotations. People who consider themselves the true left call themselves "progressives".

Or, let me use a personal, and revealing example.

Perhaps you saw the recent article in the NYT about Leo Strauss and the necons. That article has personal relevance to me since my alma mater is St. John's College—the "Great Books" school. There is a long and intimate relationship between SJC and University of Chicago, where Strauss taught, and it has everything to do with the GB movement of the 1930's. I won't go into that. But Strauss was a very close lifelong friend of a SJC professor, Klein; and Strauss later in life was an honorary tutor emeritus of the College. I heard that the difference between Klein and Strauss was that Strauss had "followers" while Klein discouraged them.

This is, I believe, a big difference between the ethos of Chicago and SJC and reveals something about the two schools and related ideologies. People tend to think that since SJC's curriculum is a bunch of "dead, white males" that it's inherently *politically* conservative. In truth, it isn't. Its students (like myself) tend to be liberal or even radical. This was true sixty years ago, and it's true today. But the professors and students associated with Chicago's core, like Strauss and Bloom and this crop of neocons, have always been politically and culturally conservative, and outspoken about it. These folks are fighting the culture wars because they believe that Western Civ is monolithic and they've idealized it. On the other hand, at SJC we're not told what any of these books "mean", we're not indoctrinated into being culture warriors, and we know better than to believe that our tradition is harmonious and is the very definition of virtue. We think the world is complicated. The Straussians and the neocons think the world is simple.

But both groups, supposedly, read the same books.

If we set aside postmodern developments and just look at the traditional definitions of conservative and liberal, we see that both groups claim to be inspired by and hold to the same ideals. Usually, it's in their analysis and application that they greatly differ. For example, I support market economics *because* I believe that it encourages social justice. I supported NAFTA *because* I wanted capital to flow to Mexico and for jobs in the US to be displaced. Is that conservative or liberal? Would the WSJ agree with me?

Keith -

thanks for the informative post, digs about my speeling mistakes excepted. And I have a lot of respect for SJC, since Jeremy Levin (the author of "Satan: His psychoanalysis and cure by the unfortunate Dr Kassler, JSPS" went there). (Oh, and The Iron Giant makes me cry every time i watch it, btw)

Celine,

Sorry, I didn't mean to be insulting. That was an example of a situation where I figured out what you meant after I had already written that I hadn't and I was too lazy to rewrite. In other words, at first I wasn't sure which word you intended and my "dig" preceded me getting a clue. So, it wasn't a dig, really.

Leven's movies have been spotty. I haven't read his book you mentioned, although I've heard of it. A Johnnie I went to school with is the author of "Eddie's Bastard", Bill Kowalski. The screenwriter of "The Tao of Steve" is a Johnnie, although I don't think it shows the school (via the protagonist) in a good light. (My deepest fear about Johnnies is that our education makes for skilled, erudite cocktail party conversation and nothing else. In other words, that we're dilettante poseurs—my impression of the protagonist of that film, as well as of its screenwriter.)

Neo-liberals? That is not a term I have heard applied to anyone.

Neo-conservatives and liberals both share internationalist foreign policy (as opposed to isolationist). While liberal foreign policy is multilateral and values human rights and emphasizes diplomacy, neo-con foreign policy is militaristic and uses military power to achieve political ends. The Neo-cons are not comfortable with diplomacy and have not learned that it is useful. That is why with the Neo-cons running our foreign policy, Powell is marginalized and the US is stuck with fixing Iraq by itself.

As for criticism of the Bush foreign policy, Buchanan is more pointed in his criticism than many on the left. If Iraq gets worse, will Buchanan challenge Bush from the isolationist right and create havoc? Don't forget he ran in 2000 and picked up all those butterfly votes in FL.

As for TNR being Neo-con, I think that accurately describes its position over the past several years. It was not always a Neo-con rag but perspective changes over time.

Bakho,

Your analysis seems historically myopic to me. Liberal foreign policy was once just as militaristic (not that I necessarily approve of this) as the necon's is. You're right that necon policy is particularly dangerous in that it's inherited the right's almost paranoid disdain for diplomacy. But it's also evangelical and eager for worldwide social engineering. It *is* friendly to the idea of "nation building"—something we see lacking right now in this administration. In other words, the neocons are *not* in charge. They've been influential but, I suspect, they've been used by people far less principled than they. As Wolfowitz has discovered.

Have I mentioned that I think Dick Cheney is the antichrist? I have?

With regards to Buchanan, he is not a threat to anyone either major party is likely to nominate, certainly not Bush. He has been spectacularly unpopular, even when he ran against NAFTA, which was the one issue that most resonated with his potential supporters. In the context of 9/11, the American people are no longer generally isolationist. Buchanan's further marginalized. His days of being relevant are long over. No doubt he's really pissed about it. But good riddance to bad rubbish.

The only threat from the right to Bush that I can see is if the religious right gets sufficiently disatisfied with Bush that they make trouble. This is possible, I think, because although Bush is a good Christian evangelical and this administration has tried mightily to keep the religious right happy, they've not been able to keep up with rising expectations. Thus the grumbling from the religious right, for example, over the "flaccid" administration support of Santorum.

Otherwise, though, the only possible threat from the conservative side of the equation to Bush would be if they pissed off Colin Powell enough to make the man run for President. This could happen if they fired him, which I expect everyone except Bush deeply wishes to do but realizes that they can't.

Finally, TNR's support for the Iraq war does not make them neocon. And in almost no other issue do their preferred policies match those of the neocons. *No* other supposedly neocon publication would ever have published the two articles that Brad quoted today. This is like claiming that Clinton was "really" a conservative since he supported welfare reform. It's an absurd oversimplification.

My first encounter with the neoconservatives of today
came at youth programs of the Ethical Culture Society
of New York when I first came to America. Since then,
one might say, we grew from adolescence to old age
together. First and foremost, it must be realized that
the term neoconservative was a designated pejorative
put upon them by fellow liberals in order to indicate
their expulsion from liberalism's left ranks. Much has
been made by Michael Lind of the Trotsyist beginings
of many of its founders. That is quite true, but it
goes far further back to WWII disillusion with
Stalinism by youths seeking an identity in a nation of
Anglo-Saxons that would not accept them.

Yet, the issue during WWII was that Stalin had his
"Jews" and FDR his; the question was where would the
preponderance of them go. Stalin lost, hence his
rather aggressive attitude towards FDR in his last
days and towards Truman. Our most effective Cold
Warriors were indeed Jews working form the ranks of
government and labor. Stalin's beginning of yet
another pogrom in his last days should make clear that
he saw Jews as pro-American, despite the Zionist
sympathies he had cultivated. The "Old Left"-- as the
"New Left" later called it, was marked by last ditch
efforts to stick with the Bolshevik class war with
America, despite Stalin's anti-semitism. The AFofL-CIO
provided many Jewish leftists a home where they could
fight for humanitarian labor causes while maintaining
their Bolshevik revolutionary elan fighting AGAINST
Communism. After 1956, the liberal-left Jewish "we can
get along" attitude towards the USSR served their
American civil rights emphasis. But, as Khrushchev
chose to side with the Arab nationalists and
Palestinians, the young future neoconservatives (a
small fraction of the Jewish population) began their
drift into a complex contradictory position of "New
Left" socialist student revolutionaries while
supporting Zionist nationalism and expansion by force
of arms. I recall the peculiar character of debate in
mid-1960s UC Berkeley, wherein the vituperative
criticism of the "neo-imperialism" of "Amerika" was
not to be allowed to extend to US support of Israel.
Our guns, in other words, were evil in the struggle
against Communist expansionism but highly moral in our
support of Israel. It is this contradiction which Bill
Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom played on to
discredit the Jewish left's opposition to our Vietnam
War.

Amongst many left Jews a rude awakening occurred--
well chronicled in Judy Klinghoffer's THE JEWISH STAKE
IN VIETNAM-- when in 1967 it was realized that Moscow
considered the Middle East a "second front" in the
global struggle. It is then that many leftist Jews
jumped to the right of the Democrat Party. Also, a
number of long time liberal Wilsonians who had
supported the LBJ-Meany global struggle against
Communism with a ferocious energy, now were ready to
support abandonment of Vietnam so that America would
be free to focus on the Middle East. Ironically, Nixon
had independently recognized during the 1967 June War
that America's involvement in Vietnam made it
incapable of defending Euro-American oil interests in
the Middle East. He favored a quick-fix resolution of
the Vietnam War through "linkage" and a more vigorous
defense of the Western stake in the Middle East. This
led to a more favorable view of him by many Jewish
liberals, abandoning their long tradition of hating
"Tricky Dick." However, they did not abandon Humphrey
in the 1968 election. It is only when Nixon squeaked
in as President and chose to model domestic affairs
after Prof. Moynehan, that they saw a way of marrying
their hawkish foreign policy perspective with their
liberal domestic agenda, under Nixon's tent. The
candidacy of McGovern in 1972 drove them fully (though
secretly) into the Nixon Camp, given McGovern
insistence on even-handedness in the Middle East. One
more critical item was the effort of "Soviet Jewery
Inc." to mobilize a massive campaign to force the Red
Bloc into permitting massive Jewish migration to
Israel in order to balance the very large Arab
population Israel had inherited after its 1967
conquests. Israel needed people, and the claim of
anti-semitism was deemed the best way to mobilize
support. Of course, the long time black allies of the
civil rights struggle were expected to vigorously jump
in. When they refused, an anti-black feeling exploded,
reciprocated by the submerged anti-Jewish feeling of
urban blacks of the North. This latter sentiment was
quickly exploited by Arab assets and funs, generating
strong anti-Zionist feelings amongst many sectors of
the black population.

What unleashed, as chronicled in the excellent book
TORN BY THE ROOTS, is a powerful popular Jewish
conservatism, distinct from the left-liberalism of
national rabbinical leaderships. This has brought
great political and financial power to the
neoconservatives at the very time when the funding of
the conservative movements from corporate Mongols was
drying up. The Reagan victory allowed much Jewish
money and support to keep alive otherwise moribund
conservative organizations and publications. With the
end of the Cold War, the foreign policy right was
rendered moot by the conservative tendency towards
domestic issues. Here the bankrolling by
neoconservatism's sympathizers brought a new guard in
the right, much of it Jewish. Though vociferous on
issues of race relations and culture, these
neoconservatives prefer involvement in security and
foreign policy issues-- the "big stuff" that does not
require much dealing with minutia but rather lends
itself to ideological personalization...such as the
New Republic's Sullivan's reference to "Europe feels
that..."

9/11 created a vacuum in the know-how of the Bush
defense and diplomatic bureaucracy, one that Zionists
and the Likud rulers of Israel were quite familiar
with. That has enabled them to greatly influence US
policies. The neoconservatives, already muddled in
their Americanistic primacy by their equally strong
Zionism, served as a conduit for the Israeli right
into the White House. Before 9/11, Sharon was seen by
the Bush team as something of an unsavory character.
But 9/11 changed all that, and the neoconservatives
put their laboriously forged ties with the despised
Christian right to work, forming a radical flank to
neoisolationist American conservatism. None of this
would have worked had Clinton not put America's global
position on hold for eight years. The neoconservative
argument about how much damage Clinton had done to
America's "unique [post-Cold War] moment" really
caught on in Republican circles and allowed the
neoconservatives to impose ideological arguments upon
America's frightened leadership. Doing to alQaeda what
Sharon was doing to the Palestinians felt right. It
was from there an easy jump through Israeli
intelligence dis-information to an attack of Iraq,
particularly in light of the unfinished job of Bush
Sr. (unfinished because in that way Bush got the war
payed for by the Arabs and could form a most desirable
coalition with them).

Bush Jr. failed to note the open ended "black hole"
into which he was allowing the neoconservatives to
drive him. By the time his Secretary of State
irrevocably told him that he had had enough (last
weekend), Bush realized that he had allowed himself to
be dragged where he could not afford to go. So now
appeals went out to Bush Sr. to provide moderate staff
that can undo the influence of the neoconservatives.
This will be reflected in the crushing firmness with
which Bush will be imposing the road map on Sharon.
The era of neoconservative "influence"-- not
domination-- of Bush has come to an end with Powell's
irreversible private announcement last week of his
plans to abandon Bush.

Daniel E. Teodoru