Much ink and many pixels have been spilled in disputations over the nature and significance of neoconservatism, particularly as this tendency appears to be the dominant political motif of the present administration. Much of the discussion has been, well, not so much a discussion as an exchange of incandescent invective, and, when it has not been so intemperate, it has tended towards the obfuscatory, as in the attempt to deny that there actually exists a definable tendency corresponding to the term "neoconservatism". Fortunately, prominent neoconservative Michael Novak has obliged those pining for a succinct exposition of neoconservatism. That interview, however, requires some interpretation; for, like a scriptural text, the story of neoconservatism is not a fit one for private interpretation, particularly the self-interpretations of those who authored it. Unlike a scriptural text, which is best interpreted from within the tradition out of which it arose, neoconservatism is best interpreted by outsiders. After all, is it not the case that we are often understood best by those who are, well, not us?
To this end, I propose to provide an interpretation of select passages from the linked Novak interview, refraining from emotionally-freighted language; imagine the deadpan delivery of Bob Dole, and you will have in mind the intended tone.
In the first generation, virtually all neo-conservatives—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and Paul Johnson in England—were not only Democrats; we were on the left wing of the Democratic Party. We were Kennedy Democrats. But from about 1972, the Democratic Party, drawing the wrong lessons from the war in Vietnam, chose as its campaign slogan, “Come home, America!” and began retreating from the world and its international burdens.
Neoconservatism, whatever the merits, or lack thereof, of the Democratic response to the mounting catastrophe of Vietnam, is constitutionally internationalist and interventionist in its approach to foreign policy, as evidenced by the "retreating from burdens" terminology. Neoconservatism also speaks of "wrong lessons" and, by implication, "right lessons" to be drawn from the failure of this vision; this possesses an enduring relevance for an understanding of the tendency, though the relevancies themselves may stand in an ironic relation to neoconservatism itself.
Then, after 1973, the Democratic Party increasingly became the party of abortion. It is still the party of abortion. From our point of view, we did not leave the Democratic Party, the party left us.
Social issues have figured in the development of neoconservatism, although the evolution of the tendency leaves open the question of whether they are integral to it. Moreover, neoconservatism is the result of the movement of the Democratic party; which, being interpreted, is to say that neoconservatism is the preservation of the consensus liberalism that postwar conservatism coalesced to oppose, finding it something worth standing athwart.
Many of us once thought that socialism was basically a good idea, but socialists had not found a practical way to implement it successfully. Then we actually started to examine the many different national experiments in socialism—almost 70. None of them worked. So socialism cannot be a good idea.
Commendably, having been left by their ancestral political home, the neoconservatives re-examined the socialist legacy and found it wanting. It is never too late to welcome the prodigal son.
Now, if you are on the Left and you cease being a socialist, what are you? If you do not take the state as the main engine of progress, where do you turn?
Neoconservatism is an essentially progressivist impulse; note that the acknowledgment of the failure of socialism did not occasion an interrogation of the notion of progress, but rather a search for an alternative philosophy for that vessel.
Like socialists, neoconservatives try to imagine, and to work toward, a better future. Unlike socialists, neoconservatives saw in a dynamic free economy a better way of breaking the chains of poverty than socialism ever discovered.
Neoconservatism, as a form of progressivism, is concerned less for what we have been than for what we might be. The future authorizes the present; and the future of a freer, more dynamic economy validates action in the present, and liberates us from the constraints of the past - the "chains of poverty". Capitalism is the engine of human liberation, the revolutionary principle at work within society.
At this point, a misconception must be corrected, lest it lead to greater misunderstanding. It might be thought that to the extent that the future figures in conservative thought, the future would be conceptualized as like the past, but characterized by, say, greater fidelity to the traditions that have defined us as a people, by a renewed resolve to pursue justice and right order. And these considerations are not absent from neoconservatism. But the narrative of conversion from socialism to capitalism seems to be foregrounded. It must not, on this account, be thought that neoconservatism neglects the weightier matters of the common good; no, neoconservatism merely assimilates them to a particular conception of political economy.
Capitalism forms morally better people than socialism does. Capitalism teaches people to show initiative and imagination, to work cooperatively in teams, to love and to cherish the law; what is more, it forces persons not only to rely on themselves and their own moral qualities, but also to recognize those moral qualities in others and to cooperate with others freely.
With this generalization, neoconservatism does not run too far afield, if the historical experiences of those nations that have 'experimented' with socialism are at all indicative. Nevertheless, the neoconservative affirmation of self-reliance is not untinged by irony, as we will see.
If you are running a company in 15 different cities, you have to trust your local manager to be telling the truth. You just cannot afford for them not to be telling the truth. This elevates the standard of truth in society. And if they’re not telling the whole truth, they’ll be fired. There’s a reverse incentive in socialism: People develop an interest in reporting only good news, and they don’t dare to tell the truth.
Neoconservatism, we now see, building on the foregoing, regards as a matter of justice, progress, and the moral development of the people the evolution of corporations which may maintain offices in fifteen different cities, and not necessarily all American cities, at that. The nature of this example is illustrative; Novak could well have argued that small proprietors and the towns they serve, by virtue of the responsibility they exercise over their properties, and the mutuality requisite to their ordered prosperity, illustrate the virtue-forming properties of a free economy, but did not. This generates numerous aporias, as such large corporations as often as not inhibit the formation of social trust by setting employees against management in struggles over outsourcing, undermine responsibility by privileging profitability over communal stability, stifle initiative by concentrating wealth and property, and devalue truth by means of the manipulation of abstract forms of property. Perhaps the clear moral advantage of this form of capitalism, then, lies in its progressive tendency to liberate from the shackles of the past, as the remainder of the ledger is rather ambiguous. This is a profound mystery.
In most nations, the most brilliant, the most artistic, the most creative products are lovingly produced by small entrepreneurs. You can get workmanship in Italy that you can’t get anywhere else in the world, and it is usually produced by small companies.
Neoconservatism acknowledges the vitality and importance of the small enterprise, yet assumes that enterprises of this nature are of the same fundamental order as big business, despite the vast differences between private ownership, with its attendant responsibility, and the diffused and abstract forms of ownership characteristic of large, publicly-traded corporations, their bureaucratic management cultures, and their homogenized products. The very structure of such a corporation is private only in the nominal sense that it is not public, as in "state-owned", and conducive to the evasion of responsibility, as evidenced by corporate bankruptcy proceedings and, occasionally, liability proceedings. Nevertheless, small businesses tend to anchor local communities, and are thus inclined to stability; they are unprogressive, and we are apparently in a hurry, as was once said of a certain type of progressive.
In summary, then, neoconservatism is the lineal descendant of consensus liberalism, interventionist in foreign affairs (nationalist as opposed to patriotic), and favours economic concentration. These things represent progress. The reader may colour the outline as desired.
Comments (15)
In short, neocons are right-liberals. They were left-liberals, and moved rightward a bit, the core of liberalism remaining.
Posted by Gintas | May 3, 2007 12:26 AM
"If you are running a company in 15 different cities, you have to trust your local manager to be telling the truth. You just cannot afford for them not to be telling the truth. This elevates the standard of truth in society."
Does this seem right even at first glance? Perhaps its true in small business; where there seems to be a direct, fleshy accountability built into standard practice. But large corporations? Maybe it elevates truth within the confines of the corporation (even that doesn't seem clear to me) but in the world outside is truth really valued to the corporation? Perhaps I'm being a little too cynical here but I've seen too much advertising, make the sell mentality, and bottom line thinking to accept that a corporation spanned out across 15 cities elevates the value of truth in society. I am just being too cynical right?
Posted by mike d | May 3, 2007 7:22 AM
Liberals and conservatives have different outlooks on society.
Fundamentally 1) the liberal sees a group where a conservative sees a bunch of individuals and 2) the conservative wants to keep good things, even if it means keeping bad things, and a liberal wants to toss out bad things, even if it means tossing out good things, as well.
It's still unclear to me where neocons fall on those two questions.
Posted by Loren Heal | May 3, 2007 8:13 AM
Excellent exegesis, Jeff.
Loren Heal:
I think alot of us here would dispute your first tenet at least. Saying "the liberal sees a group where a conservative sees a bunch of individuals" really short-changes the Conservative interest in community, which is a important backdrop to this whole post as I read it. It would be better to say that the Conservative sees both groups and individuals, and feels a duty to balance these two competing human sources of identity, however difficult that may be.
Posted by Paul J Cella | May 3, 2007 8:40 AM
Neoconservatism is, to be precise in classification, right-liberalism. But the astonishing thing is simply the fact that neoconservatives have no compunction about stating that they are still "JFK Democrats", and that the Democratic Party left them, and not they the Party; what is more astonishing still is that neoconservatism thus proclaims itself the lineal heir of the very consensus, managerial, technocratic liberalism... that post-war conservatism - as the hagiography goes, in the voice of William F. Buckley - wished to stand athwart, crying "Stop!" And now this neoconservatism, conservative primarily in the nominal sense that liberalism has more fully disclosed its inner essence in the intervening decades, actually dominates the conservative establishment and has gulled legions of conservatives into accepting neoconservative policy ambitions as coextensive with conservative ambitions. The conservative masses, one might hope, would actually recoil from the intellectual origins of neoconservatism, and yet their policies are embraced as though they were the objectives of conservatism from its inception.
Perhaps, in my astonishment, I am simply not sufficiently cynical.
Speaking of which, it is hardly cynical to doubt the alleged truth-privileging effects of large corporations. This is more than a matter of advertising and profits-before-people merchandising, but also extends to the very incentives put in place by such diffuse systems of ownership and (ir)responsibility; such arrangements create incentives to "game the system" that are not at all disanalogous with the perverse incentives of socialism. There is an obvious resemblance of the corrupt manipulations practiced by the apparatchiki of the Soviet establishment and their successors, the New Russian oligarchs, to the financial manipulations of an Enron, assorted stock-jobbers and traders, and even the squeeze-the-supplier mentality of a Wal-Mart.
If you desire a first/free world economy, you must be willing to pay for it; it cannot be acquired on the cheap, and cannot be equated with a profusion of cheap stuff.
Posted by Maximos | May 3, 2007 10:11 AM
I think I found more to like in Novak's piece than you did - I *certainly* found it less disturbing than Irving Kristol's rather cocky summary of "The Neoconservative Persuasion" from a few years back.
I particularly like Novak's emphasis on culture, and on its foundation in the family and religion. And then there's this: "experience teaches that not all cultures inculcate the same habits, ideas, and ambitions in their children. It simply is not true that all cultures are the same, or are equally successful in given areas of life. Multiculturalism can be a sentimental trap, moralistic, and destructive" - which wouldn't be a bad was of summing one of the main lessons of our attempt to "democratize" Iraq. In fact, though no doubt neoconservatives will continue to believe that the US has inevitable "international burdens" to shoulder, I bet we'll be hearing a lot less loose talk about spreading democracy around the globe. They kind of got mugged by reality on *that* one.
Also, I think it's a bit of stretch to jump from one example of how Novak thinks that corporate culture can be morally improving to the conclusion that he "favours economic concentration." This seems uncharitable.
Posted by Steve Burton | May 3, 2007 11:05 AM
Also, I think it's a bit of stretch to jump from one example of how Novak thinks that corporate culture can be morally improving to the conclusion that he "favours economic concentration." This seems uncharitable.
Were it the case that all we knew of neoconservatism were contained in the Novak interview, I would be compelled to concur in this judgment. However, knowing much about neoconservatism and the somewhat indiscriminate paeans to democratic capitalism that have issued from those quarters, I think it a fair one. Their almost uniform enthusiasm for globalization and managerial free-trade, and their customary fetishes for mass immigration, combine to make the ascription a natural one, in my judgment.
That said, the majority of the interview is actually quite good, as you say. About such things, I find myself conflicted; for what I like about neoconservatives can often be found in the writings of non-neoconservatives, while what I find worthy of disapprobation seems to be either common to liberals and neoconservatives, or to be a sort of political chimera. I can offer this observation, by way of lessening my state of mental conflictedness: neoconservatism, as with conservatism generally, was much sounder, and much more interesting, before it commandeered the apparatus of the Republican Party.
Posted by Maximos | May 3, 2007 11:21 AM
I don't think any of these labels fits me at all.
Years ago a friend of mine tried to educate me in the varieties of conservatism. He was a self-styled paleo, and he told me firmly that neocons are "big government conservatives." I suppose I can see that a bit in the FT crowd. For example, Fr. Neuhaus takes a sort of "damn the torpedoes" attitude towards all the very real worries that vouchers will corrupt the Christian schools. And why? Because he says "we" have to "do something" about the poor people whose kids are stuck in the public schools. So basically he's willing to risk ruining the private schools to make them available to the poor with tax funding, because this is a matter to him of justice.
So, okay, I see that. But then, a lot of crunchies are into environmentalism, which I most decidedly am not, so if paleos are crunchies, then...
So I'm still looking for a "small government conservative" brand that isn't just plain libertarian, because I'm pro-life and socially conservative...Maybe I'll have to found my own political religion. :-)
Posted by Lydia | May 3, 2007 7:30 PM
Paul, despite the instinctual gravitation of us each toward our own label, and especially to label others, I think pure conservatives and pure liberals are much rarer than pure baritones and pure sopranos (respectively :-).
Posted by Loren Heal | May 3, 2007 8:04 PM
However, knowing much about neoconservatism and the somewhat indiscriminate paeans to democratic capitalism that have issued from those quarters, I think it a fair one. Their almost uniform enthusiasm for globalization and managerial free-trade, and their customary fetishes for mass immigration, combine to make the ascription a natural one, in my judgment.
Like Steve Burton, I think this is an uncharitable reading of the general trend of neoconservative thought. I am not sure I understand what is meant by "managerial" free trade and economic concentration, but neoconservatives have not been, to my understanding, particular advocates of a) state support for national champions b) protection of large corporations in the name of stability, c) elite control of trade.
Nor have neoconservatives been particularly unthinking advocates of conusmer culture. Indeed, amidst the general pro-capitalist triumphalism of the American right, neoconservative paens to capitalism tend to be fairly discriminate (two cheers, even).
Posted by Ben A | May 4, 2007 11:08 AM
A lack of charity on all sides has often marked this ongoing debate, though I'm don't see any ill-will in evidence on this page. May it remain so.
The key divider, between the neo-con and the traditionalist is the former believes Christianity can not only co-exist with, but actually flourish in a civilization that has embraced the Enlightenment narrative.
Let's not give up on those who cling to this error and instead hope they complete thier journey from ideology to Faith.
Posted by Kevin Morrissey | May 4, 2007 11:32 AM
The key divider between the neo-con and the traditionalist is the former believes Christianity can not only co-exist with, but actually flourish in a civilization that has embraced the Enlightenment narrative.
This seems exactly correct. The nature of the alleged incompatibility, however, remains opaque (at least to this neoconservative sympathizer!). And even thoughtful criticisms of the "Enlightment narrative" (such as Daniel Larison's "Reimagining Conservatism in a New Light") do not make a reconciliation seem impossible. What am I missing?
Posted by Ben A | May 4, 2007 4:19 PM
I've always felt that the Enlightenment shouldn't be defined entirely in terms of the philosophes. There were wonderful Christian apologists and divines (for example) during the 18th century who defended the faith against deism but who did so in what (I _think_) would be condemned by some as a fashion that involved embracing "Enlightenment rationalism," as it was strongly evidential.
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Posted by trikapalanet | December 11, 2009 2:52 PM
Thanks for the topic, and for the links really well chosen, the subtitle "Dispatches from the 10th Crusade" is crual but so real...
Posted by thalasso | March 9, 2010 5:42 AM