In the fall of 2006, I attended a curious question and answer session with a group of political candidates in upstate New York. You know how these things work: Voters can ask anything, and the candidates reply in the hope of winning their support. One middle-aged woman well known for her liberal sympathies stood up and asked, in the most passionate of tones, how the candidates were going to prevent the "neocons" from wreaking further havoc upon the outside world. The catch, of course, is that the assembled candidates were all running for local office, and neoconservatism has very little to say about zoning ordinances and bicycle trails. But as the woman's red face and the audience's applause made clear, in the liberal imagination, nothing looms as a larger villain.

By writing They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at National Interest—a magazine founded by neoconservative grandfather Irving Kristol—has performed an invaluable service. He has brought the left's phantom menace down to size. In readable, highly compelling prose, Heilbrunn dives into the wreckage of what was once a vastly influential political-intellectual movement but today is widely derided by all comers, including former proud members. He comes back with an epic story and a useful lesson for progressives today.

The founding generation of neocons, who were Trotskyites in their youth, veered off the right-wing rails upon reaching maturity. Mostly Jewish and well-educated, the group preached an expansionist, militant nationalism, and spiced the pot further by rejecting multiculturalism (not to mention multilateralism). They reached the pinnacle of power during the second Bush administration, and pushed the Iraq war as the realization of their ideology—only to be embittered, humiliated even, by the war's massive failure.

Heilbrunn's portrayal illuminates the movement's murky depths, which can be traced all the way back to the cafeteria of the City College of New York, circa early 1930s. Known at that time as the "poor man's Harvard," the institution educated multitudes of intellectual immigrants and served as a hotbed of left-wing politics. Those who would later become known as the neocons, led by Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, and Max Shachtman, banded together to fervently argue on behalf of the exiled Russian Communist Leon Trotsky and against a much larger group who took up the cause of Joseph Stalin, the man responsible for Trotsky's exile. As immigrant Jews, these early neocons were barred from the Eastern establishment—and when they did manage to sneak in, they usually found themselves on the receiving end of religious prejudice. So they strove to create their own establishment, building a network of periodicals like Commentary and Public Interest that thrived throughout the second half of the 20th century.

"Neoconservatives are less intellectuals than prophets," Heilbrunn writes. That's certainly one way to try to pin down the schizophrenic turns in ideology the neoconservatives took in the '40s and '50s. Heilbrunn can only stare in bafflement as they move from opposing American involvement in World War II, on the grounds that America and Germany were indistinguishable from one another, to digging into Harry Truman for not pursuing the Communists aggressively enough. There was, in other words, a great leap right that occurred sometime following 1945. Heilbrunn speculates that this can be explained by great feelings of guilt over the Holocaust, which transpired during a war that the neocons were opposed to America entering. Heilbrunn more or less admits that this explanation alone is not a rational one. Yet because intellectualism is not de rigueur among the neocons, we must consider non-intellectual motivations for their endless twists and turns. Emotion, rather than reason, ruled their world.

They abandoned radical left-wing politics for good in 1949, at a conference held at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. Recently memorialized in Peter Beinart's The Good Fight, the conference pitted Communist sympathizers, who derided America's "war mongering" attitude toward the Soviet Union, against "liberal hawks," who believed that America was correct to counterbalance the Iron Curtain. The neocons were part of the latter camp. But even as Arthur Schlesinger turned liberal hawkishness into the Democratic Party consensus, the neocons moved further right still, denouncing President Truman's containment policy as insufficiently aggressive.

Albert Wohlstetter, an early "defense intellectual" and neoconservative, put forth the Strangelove-like proposition that the United States should consider launching a nuclear war against the Soviets, because such a war was actually winnable. And then, 1967: "With the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the 1967 [Arab-Israeli War], and the rise of black anti-Semitism in the United States, neoconservatism was born." All the elements that had been swirling about since the City College cafeteria debates of the 1930s—the militancy, the sense of grievance, the revolutionary posture, the belief in the power of ideas—had come together to form a potent ideological weapon which, in the coming years, would use Norman Podhoretz's Commentary magazine to launch unprecedented attacks against liberalism and the Democratic Party.

To think of neoconservatism as a weapon underscores what may be its most consistent trait: its quest for "useful" arguments, as Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz's wife, once put it. Ideas mattered, not in and of themselves, but as ways of advancing and securing power. So in the 1970s, the neocons aligned themselves with Democratic Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson, who was among Congress' most reliable anti-Soviet votes, to further anti-Soviet militancy and to reshape the Democratic Party in their own image. In the 1980s, they attached themselves to Reagan before scorning him for not taking a hard enough line against the Soviets—until the USSR collapsed, at which point the neoconservatives claimed they had supported Reagan's approach all along. In retrospect, their decision to place their quest for political power over coherence seems abundantly transparent. In the '90s, following the demise of Communism, they needed new enemies, and who else but the electoral enemies of the Republican Party would suffice? Commentary questioned evolution, siding with Christian fundamentalists. Irving Kristol wrote that American liberalism was more dangerous than Soviet Communism had ever been. And Bill Clinton was never hawkish enough for their tastes. The rebels of the City College cafeteria had become the message men of the American right.

Even as they moved to the right, the neoconservative ideology remained richly incoherent. On the one hand, they were fierce opponents of the brand of value-absent realism preached and practiced by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon; on the other hand, they had no love for the "human rights lobby," which they saw as somehow corrupt. Similarly, when Communism crumbled, they raced to endorse Frances Fukuyama's theory, outlined in his 1992 anti-Marxist treatise The End of History and the Last Man, that the liberal democratic capitalist model was destined to succeed around the world. But, as evidenced by the war in Iraq, they were willing to spread that model by any means necessary, even preemptive war.

Most of what Heilbrunn covers regarding the Iraq war is familiar territory. The second-generation neoconservatives—including journalist Bill Kristol, Irving's son—led the nation into war against Iraq, only to see it all blow up in everyone's face. Heilbrunn paints devastating pictures of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle in particular. Wolfowitz is made to look like a moral simpleton. "Racked with guilt" by the abandonment of the Shiites and Kurds at the end of the first Gulf War, he backed the invasion without ever considering that an ill-planned, ill-conceived second war would only lead to more innocent bloodshed and destruction. Perle comes off as just plain unhinged. According to Heilbrunn, in the run up to the invasion, he brought in a man named Laurent Murawiec to brief the Defense Policy Board. Murawiec, although he had spent time at the respectable Hudson Institute, was also once employed by the loony Lyndon LaRouche. Those who have called neoconservatism a cult were not that far off the mark.

Heilbrunn doubts that, at heart, the neoconservatives actually believed they would ever get to realize their wildest dreams and invade Iraq; but once presented with the opportunity, how could they resist? They had argued for so long that the path to American greatness was tied up in expanding the reach of liberal democratic capitalism at warp speed, no matter the costs, consequences, or chance of success. Bush, a blank slate in matters of foreign policy, came along and was happy to bring them along for a wild ride—a ride that brought them to where they are today, in shambles. But, as Heilbrunn warns, neoconservatism is likely to rise again.

* * *

It turns out that most Americans love their country. We unfurl the flag every Fourth of July not just because of primitive nationalism, but because we believe in a set of shared principles. If nothing else, neoconservatism's broad appeal has shown that we believe that, on the whole, America can do good in the world; and it's better to try to do good and fail than to not try at all. Sometimes we look the other way when reality doesn't match the rhetoric; sometimes we believe that because of our high ideals we are incapable of doing wrong. But the chief lesson of neoconservatism's political success is that most Americans believe that their country has a special role to play in the world, and will support politicians who share that belief. Heretical as it may be to suggest, progressives can learn from this lesson.

Left out of Heilbrunn's book, but important nonetheless, is a counter-history of the American left's attitude towards its own country. As neoconservatism championed America at every chance, the left retreated, ceding the argument. We never offered a coherent version of left-wing patriotism; the enduring image of the 2004 Democratic National Convention was the endless sea of flags in the arena—an almost pathetic attempt to squeeze hold of the country’s most powerful symbols without offering any substantive claim to them. America has been far from a perfect nation, of course. The Vietnam War? Supporting the Shah? The Trail of Tears? The "peculiar institution?" 3/5 of a man? The fate of the Native Americans? There's a long list of righteous grievances against the United States.

Yet the length of that list shouldn't be cause to neglect the power of the American idea. At the very least, such neglect will result in a vacuum that will only be filled by people like the neocons that Heilbrunn profiles—people whose vision of America is dependent on military might above all else, who reflect neither the care for the common good nor the ever rising tidal wave of human rights that has long characterized this country. There ought to be a competing vision of American greatness trumpeted by progressives. In the aftermath of the Iraq debacle, the temptation to emulate the isolationists of old—Come home, America; America First—is strong. But neoconservatism is now creeping to the dustbin of history's discarded ideologies. In its place, progressives should assert a staunchly pro-American vision for the world, against neoconservatism and unique to their values. Imagine a foreign policy that highlighted America's role in promoting human rights, individual dignity and democracy, without the ham-fisted Manichaeism that has been the neocons' bread and butter. Imagine a foreign policy that appreciated the role of complexity in world affairs.

In the end, neoconservatism was done in by its own anti-intellectualism. Despite the proliferation of magazines they spawned, and the air of the professoriate they intentionally cultivated, they never turned their own eyes upon themselves. Podhoretz remarked early in his career that he was most enamored with an idea when every educated person was against it. Such is anti-intellectualism in a nutshell: to make claims that run contrary to all available evidence. That's not wise contrarianism. That's just wrong. George W. Bush was the logical culmination of this anti-intellectualism. As Heilbrunn reports, Richard Perle was impressed the president's ability "to cut to the heart of the matter, rather than become mesmerized by Washington policy talk." In other words, Perle and the neoconservatives appreciated Bush's disdain for considering the evidence, and his discomfort with complexity. As we know now, these two character flaws were of paramount importance to the Iraq war's botched execution.

Here the progressive vision of America has a definitive edge. In 1984, while running for reelection, Ronald Regan decided to make Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." his campaign theme song. Reagan praised Springsteen in public as an example of the pride in America that his presidency was all about. But Reagan, obviously, had never listened to the lyrics (there's that darn anti-intellectualism again), which were both bursting with patriotic pride as well as deeply aware of the country's scars. It's about dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War, after all. Springsteen had to tell Reagan to stop playing it. As neoconservatism expels its dying breaths, it would be best if we embraced the spirit of that song—its complexity, its acknowledgment of failure, and its yearning for national greatness.

Ethan Porter is the Associate Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

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Comments

1. “in the liberal imagination, nothing looms as a larger villain. “

   Setting in motion a war that cost the lives of up to one million people makes the architects the largest villians of this century. For a true criminal profile consult the book “Deadly Dogma: How Neoconservatives Broke the Law to Deceive America”

   — Grant Smith - Feb 19, 01:34 PM - #
   
   

2. Wow! As I read the idealogical conclusions reached in this article, I realized I could substitute ‘progressive’ for ‘neo-con’ and know exactly how consertives feel about those who took their movement into the realm of the irrational.

   As a Liberal, I conclude both groups suffer from Dogmatic Unilateral Moronic Blindness. (DUMB)

   — RAGGEDSTEP - Feb 19, 03:36 PM - #
   
   

3. Wow! As I read the idealogical conclusions reached in this article, I realized I could substitute ‘progressive’ for ‘neo-con’ and know exactly how consertives feel about those who took their movement into the realm of the irrational.

   As a Liberal, I conclude both groups suffer from Dogmatic Unilateral Moronic Blindness. (DUMB)

   — RAGGEDSTEP - Feb 19, 03:36 PM - #
   
   

4. In the last election the american voters, by and large, were anti_intellectual for voting in Bush for a second term knowing all the mistakes he made during his first term.

   — Grace Stentz - Feb 22, 01:46 AM - #
   
   

5. Hey RAGGEDSTEP, I don’t understand what you mean. Liberal is a temporal word to me, meaning for the moment you care about liberal issues. Progressivism to me is more about questioning your own values to come up with the best way to help the country. If that’s not it, then I guess I just have more ideological flexibility in terms of helping the USA.

   — matt - Feb 26, 11:04 AM - #
   
   

6. Matt, if you truly question not only your own values but the values of those behind political movements, then you do not meet my definition of a progressive.

   The problem I see is organizations like MoveOn.org. They demand an all or nothing acceptance of their entire agenda. Anyone questioning even one aspect of their creed is labeled an apostate.

   I must also mentioned they are led by that pork sopping, carbon spewing, labor abusing, Lear jet liberal, George Soros.

   That is cult religion, not politics.

   — RAGGEDSTEP - Feb 28, 06:48 AM - #
   
   

7. Thank you for putting forth this post. I should add that a number of neocons were schooled by Leo Strauss who included a kind of Platonic doublespeak that really meant political power
   is the only thing that matters. The only other point to emphasize is that both Trotsky and Stalin believed that the world must be ruled by one power, they differed as to which power and when.
   How the two ideas; the Plato’s republic (taken literally of course)on the one hand and Trotsky on the other. Sincerely
   fitted together in theie minds.

   — Frank Lornitzo - Mar 2, 10:44 AM - #