Mapping the Neocons
By Adrian Bleifuss Prados • Feb 17th, 2008 • Category: U.S. Politics and IssuesEarlier this month, The Washington Post published a chart (below) mapping the origins and development of neoconservatism. YDSers are probably familiar with a lot of the featured personalities and institutions. The chart has appeared all over the blogosphere but I think it gets a lot of stuff wrong.
For example, I don’t think National Review played a real role in the rise of the neocons and I don’t believe Ayn Rand influenced National Review (since Bill Buckley hated Ayn Rand’s guts). I sort of resent the fact that Bill Kristol, a lightweight cable news pundit, gets the same prominence as Max Shachtman but I guess ours is an age of mediocrity.
The media makes much of Leo Strauss’ influence on the neocons. I don’t know much about Strauss, but he seems to have little to do with the Commentary crowd, the Scoop Jackson ex-liberals, Shachtmanite ex-socialists, New Republic hawks and other people I consider neoconservatives.
What do y’all think? Click HERE for a full-sized image.
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Nice post, Adrian. But do you really think New Republic hawks(I’m guessing you’re referring to Peter Beinart, for one…) are neo-cons? I think there’s a distinction to be made between hawkish neo-liberals and neo-cons. It’s that the line is blurred at times, but New Republic is still on the left side of the political spectrum, even if it’s quite interventionist in terms of foreign policy.Would you then, by association, place Paul Berman and some of Dissent’s writers in the neo-con camp just because they have been hawkish about Iraq?
Interesting how Social Democrats USA is never named.Paul Berman and other such “liberal hawks” are not neo-cons per se. They’re merely the neo-cons’ useful idiots, as Lenin might have put it. (Christopher Hitchens once called SDUSA “the useful idiots of the Reagan Revolution.” Little did we know in the 1980s that Hitchens would become George W. Bush’s u.i.)
You should read the book “The Power of the Idealist” by Berman, or maybe its “Power and the Idealist” really goes into the mentality of “hawkish-neoliberals” and also charts the journey of some European Left leaders (including hard-left leaders) from the 60s and 70s who “reconciled their ideals with reality” and pushed for involvement in Yugoslavia in the 90s etc, its pretty interesting.Dissent isnt really neocon same with New Republic, there are mainstream liberals, hawks, and a Marxist writing for Dissent, they are pro-Israel and they do conceed ground to the Right, but is the post-Cold War era the Left’s penance for self-examination isnt really a bad thing.It’s easy for the privilleged to lose sight of the goal of a better society and to fall into the traps of becoming spokespersons for imperialism.During the 60s a French Communist Party leader said that most of the student protesters/leaders would within years forget the cause and go take over their daddy’s companies and continue the legacy of capitalist exploitation, or something to that effect.Not saying its true, or that there wasnt a working-class element of the New Left of the 60s, but with the rise of the neo cons it does seem true to some extent.
I understand that Paul Berman would never consider himself a neoconservative, and no, he isn’t defending torture in the Weekly Standard. But I think his attitude is basically the same as those social democrats that started defending the Vietnam war in the early 1970s, the original neocons.
Back then, they reasoned that ol’ fashioned bourgeois democracy, whatever its failures, was superior to Stalinism, therefore the U.S. should keep killing Vietnamese people to save them from Ho Chi Minh. Today, the liberal hawks reason that liberal democracy is superior to Baathism, “Islamofascism,” etc. therefore the U.S. should invade and occupy a good number of Muslim countries. In both cases, a sound initial premise is used to justify a batshit crazy policy.