Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  What they share is a freshening and quickening of the rhetoric of violence, the poisoning of the airwaves as well as cyberspace. Ultra-chauvinist blowhards habitually demonize on air those whom they take as insufficiently patriotic as “scum” or “vermin,” and who need, in whatever manner, to be locked up, deported, or generally done away with.

  Who are these contaminating aliens lodged in the bloodstream of the body politic? Lovers of multilateralism, or the United Nations, any sort of faggoty liberal intellectual who professes a self-evidently diseased skepticism and who exercises a disguised but clawlike grip over the media. Jews? Goodness, no. Just people who happen to talk too much, think too highly of reason, and organize conferences.

  JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

  The Neoconservative Cabal

  OVER THE LAST MONTHS, the term “neoconservative” has been in the air as never before in its thirty-year career. Try entering it in Nexis, the electronic database of news stories. Even if you were to restrict the request to stories containing “Iraq” and “Bush,” the search will abort; the number of entries exceeds the program’s capacity. Seven years after Norman Podhoretz, the conductor of the neocon orchestra, pronounced the demise of the movement in these pages [Commentary], neoconservatives are seen to be wielding more influence than ever before. For it is they who, notoriously, are alleged to have transformed George W. Bush beyond all recognition. At their hands, the President who as a candidate had envisioned a “humble” America—one that would reduce foreign deployments and avoid nation building—became a warrior chieftain who has already toppled two foreign governments and has laid down an ultimatum to others warning of a similar fate.

  “The neoconservatives . . . are largely responsible for getting us into the war against Iraq,” observes Elizabeth Drew in The New York Review of Books. “The neocon vision has become the hard core of American foreign policy,” declares Newsweek. “They have penetrated the culture at nearly every level from the halls of academia to the halls of the Pentagon,” frets The New York Times, adding that “they’ve accumulated the wherewithal financially [and] professionally to broadcast what they think over the airwaves to the masses or over cocktails to those at the highest levels of government.” “Long before George W. Bush reached the White House, many of these confrontations [with other nations] had been contemplated by the neoconservatives,” reveals the National Journal.

  Overseas, where the policies attributed to the neocons are far more controversial than here, the tone is commensurately hotter. A six-page spread in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateurdescribed “les intellectuals neoconservateurs” as the “ideologues of American empire.” The article ran under a banner headline: AFTER IRAQ, THE WORLD. In England, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) aired an hour-long television special that began: “This is a story about people who want the world run their way, the American way, [and] . . . scare the hell out of people.” The Times of London anxiously urged close British cooperation with the U.S. if only to gain the leverage needed to “spike the ambitions of U.S. neoconservatives.”

  Who makes up this potent faction? Within the administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is usually identified as the key actor, together with Richard Perle, a member and until recently the chairman of the Defense Advisory Board. A handful of other high-level Bush appointees are often named as adherents of the neocon faith, including Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, National Security Council staff member Elliott Abrams, and Vice Presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI, where I work), The Weekly Standard magazine, and William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century—all three rent offices in the same building— are often described as constituting the movement’s Washington command center. And then, of course, there is this magazine [Commentary], crucible of so much neoconservative thought.

  The history of neoconservatism is less sensational than its current usage implies. The term came into currency in the mid-1970s as an anathema—pronounced, by upholders of leftist orthodoxy, against a group of intellectuals, centered mostly in Commentary and the quarterly The Public Interest, who then still thought of themselves as liberals but were at odds with the dominant thinking of the Left. One part of this group consisted of writers about domestic policy—Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer—who had developed misgivings about the programs of the New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The other main contingent focused on foreign policy, and especially on the decline of America’s position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the wake of the Vietnam war. The names here included, among others, Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Eugene V. Rostow. Although, at first, most of these people resisted the label “neoconservative,” eventually almost all of them acquiesced in it.

  Today, many who are called neoconservatives are too young to have taken part in these debates while others, although old enough, followed a different trajectory in arriving at their political ideas. This would hardly matter if neoconservatism were an actual political movement, or if there were general agreement about its tenets. But few of those writing critically about neoconservatism today have bothered to stipulate what they take those tenets to be. For most, the term seems to serve as a sophisticated-sounding synonym for “hawk” or “hardliner” or even “ultraconservative.”

  For others, however, it is used with a much more sinister connotation. In their telling, neoconservatives are a strange, veiled group, almost a cabal whose purpose is to manipulate U.S. policy for ulterior purposes.

  Thus, several scribes have concentrated on laying bare the hidden wellsprings of neoconservative belief. These have been found to reside in the thinking of two improbable figures: the immigrant American political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899– 1973) and the Bolshevik military commander Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). “Who runs things?” The New York Times asked, concluding that “it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss” with whom the Bush administration is “rife.” The Boston Globe ran a 3,000-word article claiming that “we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss,” while in a sidebar to its own feature story on the neocons, Le Nouvel Observateur introduced French readers to “Leo Strauss, Their Mentor.”

  Michael Lind, an American who writes for the British leftist magazine New Statesman, has been the most insistent voice invoking the name of Trotsky, or rather “the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement” of which, Lind says, “most neoconservative defense intellectuals . . . are products.” Jeet Heer, who expounded the Straussian roots of neoconservatism in The Boston Globe, went on to disclose the Trotsky connection in Canada’s National Post. (“Bolshevik’s Writings Supported the Idea of Pre-emptive War,” ran the subhead.) Others agreed about this dual connection. William Pfaff, in the InternationalHerald Tribune, contributed one column on the influence of Leo Strauss and another linking Bush’s foreign policy to the “intellectual legacy of the Trotskyism of many of the neoconservative movement’s founders.” In particular, in Pfaff’s judgment, administration policy “seems a rightist version of Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution.’ ”

  Actually, neither line of genealogical inquiry is new. Eight years ago, in Foreign Affairs, John Judis derided my advocacy of “exporting democracy” as a kind of “inverted Trotskyism.” As for Strauss, it was noticed as far back as the Reagan administration that a small number of the philosopher’s former students had taken policy positions in the State and Defense departments. But the prize for the recent resuscitation of Strauss’s name would seem to belong to the crackpot political agitator Lyndon LaRouche, who began to harp on it in speeches and publications months before any of the references I have cited above. LaRouche, who ceased using the pseudonym Lyn Marcus (a conscious derivation of Lenin Marx) when he vaulted from the far Left to the far Right, and who has served time in a federal penitentiary on charges of gulling elderly people out of their savings in order to
finance his political movement, has fingered Strauss “along with Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells” as the parties responsible for “steering the United States into a disastrous replay of the Peloponnesian war.”

  This preoccupation with ancestor-hunting may seem of secondary interest, but since it is typical of the way most recent “analysis” of neoconservative ideas has been conducted, it is worth pausing over for another moment.

  For one thing, the sheer sloppiness of the reporting on the alleged Strauss-Trotsky connection is itself remarkable. Thus, The New York Times claimed extravagantly that AEI consists in its entirety of Straussians, whereas a little checking yields, out of fifty-six scholars and fellows, exactly two who would count themselves as Straussians and a third who would acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to Strauss; none of the three is in the field of foreign policy. The Times also identified Perle as a Straussian—which is false—while erroneously stating that he was married to the daughter of the late military strategist Albert Wohlstetter, whom it likewise falsely labeled a Straussian. Even after an initial correction (explaining that Perle had merely studied under Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago and had not married his daughter) and a second correction (acknowledging that Perle had never studied under Wohlstetter or attended the University of Chicago), the paper still could not bring itself to retract its fanciful characterizations of either Perle’s or Wohlstetter’s ties to Strauss. The paper also mischaracterized Podhoretz as an “admirer” of Strauss, which is true only in a very loose sense. Similar errors have infected the stories in other publications.

  And Trotsky? Lind in his disquisition on “the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement” instanced seven pivotal neocon figures as the Bolshevik revolutionary’s acolytes: Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, Bolton, Abrams, James R. Woolsey, and Perle. This was too much for Alan Wald, a student of political ideas and himself a genuine Trotskyist who pointed out that none of these men “ever had an organizational or ideological association with Trotskyism.” Even more ludicrously, Lind characterized a series of open letters to the President published by the Project for the New American Century as “a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors”; whatever Lind may have had in mind by this phrase, genuine Trotskyists would be less interested in sending petitions to the President than in hanging him from the nearest lamppost.

  In truth, I can think of only one major neocon figure who did have a significant dalliance with Trotskyism, and that was Irving Kristol. The dalliance occurred during his student days some sixty-odd years ago, and whatever imprint it may have left on Kristol’s thought certainly did not make him a neoconservative on foreign policy, for in that area his views have been much more akin to those of traditional conservatives. During the 1980s, for example, Kristol opposed the “Reagan Doctrine” of support for anti-Communist guerrillas and belittled the idea of promoting democracy abroad.

  But that brings us to the actual ideas of these two presumed progenitors of neoconservatism. Strauss, according to Jeet Heer, emerges from a close reading as a

  disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity.

  Similarly, Pfaff:

  An elite recognizes the truth . . . and keeps it to itself. This gives it insight and implicitly power that others do not possess. This obviously is an important element in Strauss’s appeal to American conservatives. . . . His real appeal to the neoconservatives, in my view, is that his elitism presents a principled rationalization for policy expediency, and for “necessary lies” told to those whom the truth would demoralize.

  Neither Heer nor Pfaff offers a clue as to where in Strauss’s corpus one might find these ideas, giving one the impression that they learned what they know of him from a polemical book by one Shadia Drury, who holds a chair in “social justice” at a Canadian university and who finds Strauss to be a “profoundly tribal and fascistic thinker.” In any event, although Strauss did write about restrictions on free inquiry, notably in Persecution and the Art of Writing, his point was not to advocate persecution but to suggest a way of reading philosophers who had composed their work in unfree societies. Far from the authoritarian described by Heer and Pfaff, Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was a committed democrat whose attachment and gratitude to America ran deep and who, in the words of Allan Bloom (perhaps his most famous student), “knew that liberal democracy is the only decent and just alternative available to modern man.”

  Both Heer and Pfaff make Strauss out to be a Machiavellian, but both have the story upside down. If there is a single core point in Strauss’s teachings, including his book on Machiavelli, it concerns the distinction between ancients and moderns; his own affinity—perhaps eccentric, certainly “conservative”—lay with the thought of the former, who were devoted to knowing the good, in contradistinction to the latter, who were more exclusively concerned with practical things. In this understanding, it was Machiavelli who initiated the philosophical break with the Platonic/Aristotelian tradition, a development that Strauss regarded as baneful. But reading political counsel into Strauss is altogether a misplaced exercise. He was not a politico but a philosopher whose life’s work was devoted to deepening our understanding of earlier thinkers and who rarely if ever engaged in contemporary politics.

  If Strauss’s writing is abstruse, Trotsky by contrast is easy to understand, at least if one knows the basic formulas of Marxism. Nonetheless, those who invoke him as another dark influence on neoconservatism are no better informed than those who invoke Strauss. Lind and Pfaff and Judis all refer portentously to Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution,” apparently under the impression that by it Trotsky must have intended a movement to spread socialism from one country to another in much the same violent and revolutionary manner that neocons supposedly aim to disseminate their own brand of democracy around the world.

  But the theory of permanent revolution was about other matters entirely. According to the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Marxists, the socialist revolution could unfold only some years after capitalism and the bourgeoisie had triumphed over feudalism in undeveloped countries like Russia; this meant that socialists had no choice but to support capitalism until it ripened and set the stage for revolution. From this prospect of deadly boredom, Trotsky rescued the movement by arguing for an immediate seizure of power in hopes of somehow telescoping the bourgeois and socialist revolutions into one seamless sequence. That was “permanent revolution.”

  As is the case with the Strauss-hunters, it is far from evident what any of this has to do with Iraq, terrorism, or promoting democracy. The neocon journalist Arnold Beichman put it sardonically and well: “STOP THE PRESSES: Trotsky . . . wouldn’t have supported the Iraq war.” On second thought he probably would have—on Saddam’s side.

  Finally, if the attempts to link neoconservatives to Strauss and Trotsky are based on misidentification and misconstruction, the fact that both linkages have been made—in some cases by the same writer—is stranger still. For it would be hard to come up with a more disparate pair of thinkers. Strauss’s mission was to take us back by means of contemplation to the nearly lost past of classical antiquity. Trotsky’s was to lead mankind by means of violent action to an unprecedented new society. The one aimed to rescue philosophy from ideology; the other was the consummate ideologue. How, exactly, does neoconservatism bear the earmarks of both of these projects simultaneously? No one has attempted to explain.

  There is, however, one thing that Strauss and Trotsky did have in common, and that one thing may get us closer to the real reason their names have been so readily invoked. Both were Jews. The neoconservatives, it turns out, are also in large proportion Jewish—and this, to their detractors, constitutes evidence of the ulterior motives that lurk behind the policies they espouse.

  Lind, for example, writes that neocons “call their revolutionary ideology ‘Wilsonianism
’ . . . , but it is really Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism.” Lind’s view was cited at length and with evident approval by the National Journal, which noted that he “isn’t alone”:

  Commentators from surprisingly diverse spots on the political spectrum [agree] that neocons took advantage of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to advance a longstanding agenda that is only tangentially related to keeping the United States safe from terrorism. In this view, America’s invasion of Iraq and threatening of Syria have little to do with fighting terrorism, eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or promoting democracy. Instead, those actions largely have to do with settling old grievances, putting oil-rich territory into friendly hands, and tilting the balance of power in the Middle East toward Israel.

  Elizabeth Drew made a similar point, if more opaquely:

  Because some . . . of the neoconservatives are Jewish and virtually all are strong supporters of the Likud party’s policies, the accusation has been made that their aim to “democratize” the region is driven by their desire to surround Israel with more sympathetic neighbors. Such a view would explain the otherwise puzzling statements by Wolfowitz and others before the [Iraq] war that “the road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad.” But it is also the case that Bush and his chief political adviser Karl Rove are eager both to win more of the Jewish vote in 2004 than Bush did in 2000 and to maintain the support of the Christian Right, whose members are also strong supporters of Israel.