BANDWAGON POLITICS
You see,
they really really want to impose what Kristol calls
"benevolent
global hegemony" on the world, so bad they can practically
taste it. That's why the Standard gang has been rather,
uh, promiscuous when it comes to presidential politics, first
jumping on the short-lived Colin Powell bandwagon, and when
that failed to get off the ground glomming on to George W.
Bush. But when the Bushies failed to stand at attention while
the little Lenin of neoconservatism imparted reams of unsolicited
advice, Kristol & Co. turned to McCain, whose bloodthirstiness
seemed to match even their own.
THEY CAN'T
GET NO SATISFACTION
What the
neocons need, and depend on, the way a drug addict depends
on his fix, is power – presidential power. Only the
President of the United States has the power to make their
dreams of Empire come true; only he can send the troops in
with a single command, without consulting Congress or even
informing them. That is why they have been lusting mightily
after a direct line to the White House: otherwise, as the
old song put it, they can't get no satisfaction.
NEOCON VANGUARD
The neocons
– famously described as "liberals who have been mugged"
– jumped ship on the left in the aftermath of the Vietnam
war and the "McGovernization" of the Democratic party in the
'70s and early '80s. They attached themselves to the tail
end of the victorious conservative movement just as it was
marching into Washington and unseating the liberal establishment,
to which they had paid fealty for all the years of its unchallenged
dominance. Over time, they had taken a number of widely disparate
positions on domestic cultural and economic matters, from
fuzzy-headed liberal to hardheaded conservative, but with
a single constant: a vehemently aggressive foreign policy
stance, one that led them to cheerlead each and every foreign
intervention since the Vietnam war era. From Reagan's heyday
as the great "liberator" of Grenada, to Bill Clinton's Pyrrhic
"victory" in Kosovo, the neocons have in every instance acted
as the vanguard of the War Party.
A SEA CHANGE
During the
cold war, this had certain political advantages, especially
for an ostensible conservative. But today, it is counterproductive
politically, especially on the Right. The times, they are
a changin' – this is a point I have been making ever since
the early days of Antiwar.com and the inception of this column.
Every couple of decades, the two ends of the political spectrum
undergo a fundamental shift on the key issue of foreign policy,
a switch in polarities that inverts their previous positions
and causes a general political realignment. Now, finally,
someone else has finally taken notice of this phenomenon.
TOLD YA SO
Peter Beinart,
a senior editor of The New Republic, has been watching
this re-polarization process unfold, as exemplified by The
Weekly Standard's ideological acrobatics. In a
two-part article, Beinart argues that Kristol & Co.
are "trying to have it both ways" by endorsing Bush's "huge"
tax cut and wringing their hands over his "meager"
defense budget. For how do we pay for the huge military buildup
jointly supported by the New Republic and the Weekly
Standard? Not only that, but the editors of this neo-conservative
flagship, according to Beinart, don't really belong on the
right: they are really liberals, after all, because liberalism
has now, for all intents and purposes, become the semiofficial
War Party. We
have been saying this all along.
LOVE LETTERS
Beinart's
advice to Kristol and his mini-faction is to "ditch the conservative
movement altogether" and join (or, rejoin) the liberals. "Come
on in, Bill," says Beinart, "the water's fine"! Beinart's
columns are kind of like public love letters, a political
courting ritual that tells us much about the present state
of American politics, and, most important, demonstrates the
centrality of foreign policy in the evolution of domestic
political actors.
UNREQUITED
LOVE
Beinart
avers that he and his fellow editors over at the New Republic
really really like the Weekly Standard, while
admitting that Kristol & Co. hardly find this thrilling.
"Right-wingers assume that we admire The Standard because
we see what its editors won't admit: that under the surface,
they're not really conservatives at all," writes Beinart,
and, what's more: "Those right-wingers are absolutely right."
Now, I have no way of knowing just whom Beinart has in mind:
perhaps these anonymous rightists are too politically incorrect,
too out of the "mainstream" to be named, but those of my readers
who have been following this column for even a few months
surely know that this has been a constant theme. I am glad
to see that this view has finally received some acknowledgment,
albeit indirectly: not only that, but I am absolutely delighted
that the liberals have finally begun courting the neocons,
declaring their love in public and in print. Who knows, perhaps
Kristol – who once declared that the conservative movement
is "finished" – may allow himself to be seduced with a few
bars of "Bill Kristol, won't you please come home?"
THE LONG MARCH
Of course,
the Weekly Standard editor was never on the left; it
was his father, Irving, the "godfather" of the neoconservative
tendency, who started
out life as a Trotskyist, and wound up becoming the most
single influential conservative intellectual in America. But
the generational saga is such a distinctly American art form,
and there is no reason why it shouldn't also manifest itself
in the political sphere. The Long March of the neoconservatives,
as I have repeatedly made the point in this column, is hardly
over: a right turn was sure to be followed by a left turn,
and now this has become so obvious that the left is sitting
up and beginning to take notice.
IS THAT A THREAT,
OR A PROMISE?
Bill Kristol
once threatened to leave the Republican party over its "isolationism"
on the issue of our Balkan intervention, and I responded that
I hoped we could take him at his word. We can only hope that
this picture-perfect romance with Beinart and the New Republic
begins to blossom and that Kristol – emboldened by this
series of love letters from the left – will finally come
out of the closet, so to speak, as a card-carrying liberal.
In any case, Beinart makes a key point about the vast gulf
that separates the neocons from the conservative rank-and-file:
"The Standard (like TNR) supports missile
defense because it could allow the US to intervene internationally
without being deterred by rogue states. Most conservatives
support missile defense because it offers America an excuse
to expend less blood and treasure abroad. The Standard
wants more money for military salaries and benefits because
they think we owe it to the soldiers we ask to go to war.
Most conservatives want that spending because they see the
military as a partisan interest group they must keep happy
– both through pay increases and by opposing the kinds of
foreign deployments most soldiers and officers despise."
MILITARISTS
AGAINST THE MILITARY
This last
point is particularly telling. What's refreshing about Beinart
is that he is willing to admit what Kristol and the neocons
would never acknowledge: that the military itself is the greatest
obstacle to our foreign policy of endless meddling in the
affairs of other nations, a testament to the utter recklessness
of interventionism. Here, the Left's contempt for the military
takes the residual form of disdaining them as amoral and rather
thickheaded, reluctant warriors who will opt for pay increases
over foreign deployments the way children prefer candy to
broccoli. Beinart continues:
"In
other words, for most conservatives, Bush's defense budget
– which has lots of money for missile defense and for troop
salaries, housing, and health care, but nothing to improve
military readiness – is just fine. The guys at The Standard
worry that because of Bush's budget America might eventually
have to withdraw from the Balkans, and couldn't fight another
war in the Gulf. But most Republican congressmen would be
thrilled to see the U.S. leave Bosnia. I doubt many of them
would have much appetite for taking on Saddam again either."
Well, we
can only hope when it comes to that last: from my own anti-interventionist
perspective, this seems unduly optimistic, but I am happy
to be persuaded. As for the rest of Beinart's remarks: has
there ever been a clearer exposition of the lines of demarcation
that separate the post-cold war left from the right of the
new millennium?
FLYNN'S INSIGHT
Beinart's
insight – that the conservative imperative to cut government
spending is inconsistent with the imperial impulse – reflects
the thesis of John T. Flynn, the Old Right liberal-turned-conservative
(and former columnist for the New Republic), who was
FDR's great antagonist. That "country squire in the White
House," as Flynn called him, was trying to spend his way out
of the great Depression but, ultimately, he ran up against
resistance from conservatives. FDR turned to war preparations
in order to win over key conservative support for his program
of big government. The President had gone as far as he could
go in imposing a vastly empowered central authority on the
American people, said Flynn:
"When
this point is reached in spending programs, there is always
one kind of project left that breaks down resistance – which
particularly breaks down resistance among the very conservative
groups who are most vocal against government spending. That
is national defense. The once sure and easiest way to command
national assent from all groups is to ask it for national
defense."
RISE OF THE
WELFARE-WARFARE STATE
This was
the great victory of the New Deal, and its successor regimes:
neutralizing conservatives by shrinking the spectrum
of "respectable" opinion. FDR's great ideological achievement
was the creation of a political consensus that spanned the
distance between permitted extremes. This consensus consisted
of bi-polar support for the welfare state at home, and for
a policy of global intervention abroad: in short, the Welfare-Warfare
State. This arrangement was supported, in its essentials,
for as long as the cold war lasted. Although the liberal left
and the ostensibly conservative right quibbled over small
details, they agreed on the basic expansionist formula:
big government at home, coupled with empire-building abroad.
But then the Berlin Wall fell – and, with it, the Rooseveltian
consensus.
BIG GOVERNMENT
AND GLOBALONEY
The implosion
of communism and the end of the cold war also pulverized the
New Deal consensus, and gave rise to a powerful opposition
current whose growth and development has been chronicled in
my works, not only in this column but in my 1993 book, Reclaiming the
American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
A current on the Right began to rediscover its Old Right roots,
and returned to the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers,
disdaining entangling alliances and seeking to avoid war,
where possible, rather than provoke it. The opposition of
a vocal group on the Right to the Gulf war, followed by the
almost universal rejection by conservatives of the Kosovo
aggression as in any way a "just" war, is a trend that has
culminated in a near-total victory for the anti-interventionist
cause. Today, "globalism" is as much of a bogeyman on the
right as communism used to be. The post-New Deal arrangement,
then, is beginning to break down, because the treason of the
conservatives is finally coming to an end. The right, it seems,
has woken up, and, finally, made the connection between big
government and globaloney. Only Bill Kristol and his little
band of neocons haven't quite gotten it, as yet.
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