Neoconservatism's Conflicted Past

American Neoconservatism
Jean-Francois Drolet
256 pp. Columbia University Press. $30. 
Jean-François Drolet’s American Neoconservatism, a concise blend of political theory, intellectual history, and contemporary politics, marks one of those rare occurrences of highly relevant academic literature. Drolet’s aim in the work is to challenge the neoconservative hearkening for a moral, united America by uncovering the doctrine’s anti-Enlightenment ideological roots, and so reveal it as an ideology based on anti-liberal values. His message is a persuasive one, and he adds to it with insight into the ambiguous position neoconservatism has in contemporary American politics: that is, in our current state of blurry post-neoconservatism.
The story that Drolet details is a familiar one. Neoconservatism took shape among the group of mostly Jewish intellectuals at the City College of New York in the 1930s and ‘40s, who numbered as members Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer. The still-young theorists began as Trotskyists, but quickly grew disillusioned with Stalin’s brutality. Turning to support FDR’s New Deal, they also were chagrined by the “excesses” of the welfare state, and shocked by the social and cultural upheavals of the ‘60s. So neoconservatism evolved in the next two decades as its own political faction, aligning with the Republican Party after Jimmy Carter’s weak performance as president and Ronald Reagan’s promising election.
Drolet digs deeply into this account by focusing most of his attention on the man who inspired these voices of neoconservatism: Leo Strauss. Strauss, a Jewish-German émigré who specialized in classical political philosophy, critiqued the prevailing progressivism of his era by problematizing Enlightenment liberalism, arguing its embrace of reason led to the dissolution of any commanding truth, which resulted in the kind of moral relativism that could lead to the rise of extremists, such as the Nazis. Strauss claimed that the state should not abdicate its hold on morality, but instead take on the responsibility of “cultivating” its citizens. Liberalism, by allowing individuals to define happiness on their own terms, led to democratic decline.
The idea resonated with the New York intellectuals, members of the silent majority who viewed ‘60s radicalism as a degrading exercise, and to whom value-neutral social science seemed only to justify individual morals. Kristol questioned in 1970, “how can a bourgeois society survive in a cultural ambiance that derides every traditional bourgeois virtue and celebrates promiscuity, homosexuality, drugs, political terrorism…?” His reaction was to fight liberal nihilism with a crusade of tradition. For Kristol, this was a return to ordinary American values. In fact, he argued that “the ‘neo’ in neoconservatism is [the] insistence that the American people have always had an instinctive deference toward such standards.”
Drolet paints these early neoconservative sentiments as deluded. Neoconservatives were not advocating for the preservation of the Framers’ virtues, but for an anti-democratic idea of society antithetical to natural rights. The neocon prescription was based on a static, homogenous definition of American culture and values, protected from interference by citizens. As Drolet argues, the neoconservative project “is not so much to ‘conserve’ this bourgeois society as to transform it into a post-welfare community of values within the existing class structure… a politically motivated de-politicization of social relations that ultimately separates liberalism from democracy.” The de-legitimization of citizen demands and the role of the state in regulating economic inequities is far from the essential, creative role of dissent that the Framers had been careful to weave into the Constitution’s fabric.
At the heart of Drolet’s reading of neoconservatism is his assertion that the ideology is “polyarchic,” an idea developed by Seymour Martin Lipset and inspired by Joseph Schumpeter’s classic idea of elitist democracy—formed in the authoritarian inter-war milieu. According to Schumpeter, polyarchic democracy is a process by which competing elites battle for the approval of a largely passive electorate. The political elite also manipulates the public’s general will, supposedly for the good of society. Drolet argues that the polyarchic model is vital to neoconservatism for two reasons: first, like neoconservatism, the model separates politics from economics, leaving socio-economic inequality unquestioned; second, it de-legitimizes bottom-up struggles by civil society, removing the transformative potential of democracy. Drolet argues that such an elitist conception of democracy was legitimized under Reagan, who combined it with aspects of neoliberalism to form the Washington Consensus, shaping the world’s perception of the U.S. as a modern capitalist, imperial power.
In the early 1990s, neoconservatives might have dismissed this critical view. Neconservatism had critics (and few back then), but so what? In the aftermath of the Cold War and the U.S. victory, the neocon reading of America’s role seemed aligned with world events – and its dangers weren’t apparent. The alternative, a drawback from ideological quests, seemed a sacrifice of the kind of political stability the U.S. had successfully created. And with 9/11, another battlefront opened up; America launched a decidedly moral response to a threat—terrorists—harboring a complete lack of morality. This departure from realism may not have been less moral, but was certainly more dangerous. Yet, despite the criticisms liberals and more traditional conservatisms have made of it, as Drolet repeatedly points out throughout “American Neoconservatism”, neoconservatism has been accepted as a thoroughly American ideology.
Of course, to Drolet, this is a strange anomaly. Given that neoconservatism is anti-liberal and largely anti-democratic, predatory upon the American ideal of natural right, how is it that the doctrine has become so established in the platforms of not only the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party as well? Alexandra Homolar-Riechmann of the University of Leicester notes in Contemporary Politics how neoconservative arguments for capitalism’s moral justification, religion’s public relevance, and individual merit’s stature within a limited welfare state are widely accepted in America. In the realm of foreign policy, institutions supportive of the Democratic Party (many of which sprung up to match the neocon network in recent years), call for promoting “Democratic” values abroad through a balance of ideals and realism, a program that doesn’t sound very different from that of neoconservatives. And after all, military spending under Obama is higher than under Bush, and the current president hasn’t exhibited an effort to invest in diplomacy and cultural exchange before relying on military solutions.
The answer might lie somewhere in the difficulty Obama has faced in holding on to both value-based process and value-centric ends in a world of insecure nation-states and distinct codes of legality. Moreover, despite Drolet’s larger argument that neoconservatism is a liberal contradiction, the neoconservative championing of the free market ideal has been a common theme throughout our country’s short history. Ultimately, the fact that neoconservatism exerts a significant influence over American politics is one left unexplained in American Neoconservatism. However, Drolet’s well-articulated work leaves us in a better position to challenge it.