Betrayal of the Old Right, Lecture 5

The Neoconservatives, Part 1

Beginnings

• The neocons are a separate group from the NR conservatives. But they also reject laissez-faire and non-interventionism.

• The neocon movement began among liberal Democrats.

• During the late 1960s, the Cold War consensus was breaking down. This consensus appealed to many Democrats beginning with Truman.

The Truman Consensus

• The Truman Democrats accepted and tried to extend FDR’s New Deal.

• In foreign policy, they favored the active pursuit of the Cold War. There was a split on the left in the 1948 between the anti-communist supporters of Truman and the Henry Wallace supporters.

Schlesinger

• The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., gave an account of this point of view in The Vital Center (1949).

• Schlesinger said that an interventionist American state would be ideally suited to wage a battle against fascism and communism.

• A true conservative would favor conserving the gains of the New Deal.

Breakdown of the Consensus

• In the 1960s, the Cold War consensus wasn’t working well.

• The Vietnam War was unpopular. It led to about 58,000 American deaths and it wasn’t clear what the US national interest was in defending South Vietnam from the North Vietnamese communists.

• Why die to preserve the credibility of American power?

Breakdown Continued

• The protests became very strong and questioned American foreign policy completely.

• Groups like the SDS called for revolutionary change in American society. There were riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

• In 1972, the Democrats nominate George McGovern, who strongly criticized American foreign policy. He called for a withdrawal from Vietnam and a 37% reduction in defense spending.

Against the Critics

• Many Democrats did not like the McGovern movement. They wanted to preserve the Cold War consensus.

• A number of these people were associated with Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington He supported the New Deal and favored a strongly anti-Soviet foreign policy. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle worked for him.

• He was strongly pro-Israel.

The Original Neocons

• A group of New York intellectuals became associated with the critics of Democratic party radicalism.

• Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Bell grew up in New York. They attended CCNY in the late 1930s and were Trotskyites.

Glazer and Bell

• Glazer and Bell became sociologists. They were journalists who became academics---both ended up teaching sociology at Harvard.

• Both of them were more interested in domestic policy than foreign policy.

• They didn’t reject LBJ’s Great Society entirely—both were socialists—but they argued that many of the programs weren’t working well.

Glazer and Bell Continued

• They argued that the Great Society programs weren’t working because they didn’t address fundamental problems of character among the poor.

• These problems included lack of two-parent families among blacks and high rates of out-of-wedlock births.

• Bell argued that capitalism is self-undermining because it leads to pleasure-seeking rather than the virtues of hard work and enterprise.

G and B Concluded

• Both Bell and Glazer wrote for The Public Interest, a magazine that attracted wide interest because of its careful empirical criticisms of Great Society programs.

• Neither of them ever changed from being liberal Democrats. They eventually faded out of the neocon movement.

Kristol

• The most important figure in the neocon movement was Kristol.

• After WWII, he was associated with an anti-Communist group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He also worked for Encounter magazine.

• Both of these received funding from the CIA.

Kristol and the Neocons

• How does Kristol differ from Glazer and Bell? Like them, he criticized the Great Society for its lack of stress on virtuous habits.

• After the Democratic Party didn’t go the way he wanted, he allied with the Reagan presidency. He became close to the NR conservatives.

Kristol’s Ideas

• Kristol explicitly considered himself a neocon.• He stressed that neoconservatism was more a style

of thought than an explicit body of doctrine. Nevertheless, he in fact had definite ideas.

• He thought that “the idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with a conservative political philosophy---as Bismarck knew a hundred years ago.”

Ideas Continued

• Kristol was very much influenced by Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life. This called for a new American nationalism.

• The role of the government was to guide the people. Kristol has little use for individual rights, taken apart from public duties. He did not view the American Revolution as a radical assertion of human rights.

Kristol and Capitalism

• Kristol opposed socialism. He argued against egalitarian policies. He asked, if equality is desirable, how much equality should we have? There isn’t a clear criterion.

• Nevertheless, he criticized capitalism for leading to selfishness. It must be guided by the state.

Kristol and Foreign Policy

• Kristol was primarily a writer on domestic policy, to the extent he wrote on policy issues. Many of his essays were on the history of ideas. His wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a leading intellectual historian.

• His approval of Croly and the new nationalism shows his willingness to approve of an aggressive foreign policy. The concentration on foreign policy became much more important for the later neocons, like William Kristol, Irving Kristol’s son.

Kristol and Strauss

• Although Kristol stressed that neoconservatism wasn’t a fixed philosophy, C. Bradley Thompson, in Neoconservatism: An Obituary for An Idea, has presented a strong argument that Kristol’s views did have a philosophical source.

• This source was Leo Strauss. Kristol said that reading Strauss was the most important intellectual event of his life.

• Milton Himmelfarb, Kristol’s brother-in-law, wrote about Strauss and showed a detailed knowledge of his work.

Strauss and Elitism

• Interpreting Strauss is controversial, but one way to take him is that the people must be guided by a philosophical elite. Compared to the philosophers, the masses aren’t really human beings. It is justifiable to deceive the masses.

• Strauss defended natural law and Rothbard is sympathetic to this. But the question is, what is the content of natural law? Does this allow rule by a philosophical elite?

Virtue

• Why does the public have to be guided by the philosophers? Besides the general point that the masses are inferior, there is an additional point that enters the scene with the rise of capitalism.

• Capitalism encourages each person to think of his own material interests above all else. Acquisitiveness becomes the primary virtue. The philosophical elite has to counteract this.

Strauss and Capitalism

• Strauss had a very negative view of John Locke. He saw Locke as basically a Hobbesian. He preached acquisitiveness as the primary virtue and was in essence a utilitarian. Strauss downplays Locke’s approval of natural rights.

• Strauss was a friend of the British socialist historian R.H.Tawney, who sponsored his academic career in England. Tawney condemned capitalism for its fall from the more harmonious society of the Middle Ages.

Virtue and War

• Although the philosophical life is the highest possible, great power politics also has value.

• Strauss was influenced by Carl Schmitt, the controversial German political thinker.

• War provides one means that people can develop virtue, e.g., courage. They becoming willing to sacrifice. This is the key to Thompson’s interpretation of neocon foreign policy---the neocons promote war in order to mold the public.