It’s Always 1939 for Neoconservatives

In a very good book review in Forward, Gal Beckerman reviews Murray Friedman’s recent book on neconservatism, which examines the role of its adherents’ Jewishness in shaping the neoconservative philosophy. Neoconservatism is too often mocked and misunderstood. It is a distinct strand of conservatism defined by self-labeled neconservatives. It is not simply a figment of the imagination of the Bush administration’s critics. The early neoconservatives were mostly formerly liberal Jewish intellectuals, disgusted with the excesses of the New Left, and closely associated with the neoconservative flagship publication Commentary. Their research did a lot to add the rigor of social scientific support to a number of inchoate consevative instincts, and they developed much of the intellectual justification for Reagan’s “roll back” foreign policy.

That said, since the fall of the Soviet Union, their philosophy and the neoconservatives themselves have been a group in search of a mission. Whether supporting American Greatness foreign policy or liberalization of the Republican Party on social issues, the gap between neoconservatives and other conservatives has become more pronounced. At the same time, the influence of neoconservatives on mainstream Republican attitudes is at an all time high. This administration in particular is defined by the neoconservative viewpoint on any number of subjects: immigration, Iraq, and Israel.

The problems of neconservative philosphy have thus become everyone’s probems. Only they and their polar opposites, the isolationists, had a coherent explanation for 9/11. The former pointing to too little involvement in the Middle East, the latter too much. The neoconservatives policy won out, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive solution to Middle Eastern discontent in the form of an American-led democratic revolution. This appealed to the quintessential American attributes of idealism and the desire to solve problems in a comprehensive way, coupled with the belief that the world of foreign policy involves discrete problems which allow for discrete solutions. The neconservatives parlayed their explanation of the events of 9/11 into their centerpiece effort: the war in Iraq coneived of as the catalyst of a Middle Eastern democratic revolution.

Beckerman notes that the combination of the neoconservatives’ Jewish identity and their understanding of the Holocaust informs a great deal of the neconservative imagination, in particular on their view of America, foreign policy, and Israel. The exceptional Jewish tragedies of the 20th Century, and the neconservatives identification with them, has apparently influenced their sense of perspective on how to confront threats, in particular from the vantage point of a superpower. The delays in United States intervention in World War II, the mass suffering that resulted, the spectacular successes in defeating the totalitarian Nazi and Japanese regimes, and the conversion of these countries to model democracies postwar all form the central historical reference points of the neoconservative viewpoint. Their bias in foreign policy is almost always for action because their evaluations tend to exaggerate threats and underestimate the difficulties of translating intervention into success. While these heuristics are understandable and also forgiveable given recent history, part of wisdom comes from transcending such distortions.

He writes:

Holocaust consciousness was growing in the 1970s, as was a renewed sense of threat to Jews and a feeling that, as Podhoretz put it, the postwar “statute of limitations” on anitisemitism had run out. Israel’s security, threatened in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War — both events that gave Jews existential pause — suddenly became a top American Jewish concern. Podhoretz came to identify more and more with the defense of Jews, and by the 1980s, half his articles on international affairs focused on Israel and threats to the Jewish people.

This sense of threat, both historically informed and contemporary, gave a very particular tint to the fierce anti-communism professed by neoconservatives. Hannah Arendt had already drawn a moral equation between communism and Nazism, writing in her “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that both represented “absolute evil,” just two sides of the same totalitarian coin. And that was where Podhoretz and his friends picked up in the mid-1970s. Unlike the Irish-Catholic anti-communism of Joe McCarthy and William Buckley, whose hatred of the Soviet Union came out of an almost religious opposition to Soviet godlessness, this Jewish anti-communism was born out of a kind of historical analogy, filled with a moralistic fury against another totalitarianism whose ideology and power threatened the world.

As Ruth Wisse points out in her contribution to the Commentary collection, neoconservatives projected the threat they instinctively understood as Jews onto America as a whole, and it sharpened their sense that only an aggressive defense of the country and its values was appropriate and that any appeasement was criminal. Or as former neocon Michael Lind recently wrote: For neoconservatives, “it is always 1939.” . . .

There’s no doubt that reminding Americans of the risk to their way of life, their existence, helped this country win the Cold War. This was, perhaps, a Jewish gift to conservatism. But now, this same historical framework and its accompanying rhetoric have only obfuscated the situation.

If it is World War IV we are fighting, then distinctions between Al Qaeda and Iraq become incidental; the utter failure of the postwar reconstruction becomes a detail; even worries about the under-equipped and under-manned counter-insurgency can be set aside. Freedom is on the march, as the administration often argues. It might even be true, as some administration officials suggest, that to raise doubts is tantamount to standing beneath Chamberlain’s umbrella.

But it is not 1939. The enemies who wish us harm in this new century are more amorphous, scattered, complex. Armies alone cannot defeat them. Constitutions alone won’t do it, either. We need to be strategic and nuanced and, in this, Jewish memory will not help us. Fear begat neoconservatism — fear that enemies inside and out would destroy an America that had come to represent a second kind of promised land. And maybe, just as American Jews need to evolve a positive identity based on more than just the horror of annihilation, neoconservatism, too, needs to understand America’s actual position in the world: what it means to be a sole power, what limits and prerogatives this imposes, and how, most of all, to add a much needed dose of realism to an otherwise important and worthy sense of idealism.