"What is a Neocon?" From Neocon Europe

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"What is a Neocon?" From Neocon Europe  


The phrase is a contraction of neo-Conservative, and is used to relate to a fairly small group of individuals and organisations who represent a sect within (and who differ from) the larger Conservative movement, with its connections to the Republican Party in the United States of America. Coined by Michael Harrington, the label was later embraced by the group, though a few have since tried to disown it. The term also denotes a political bricolage and maneuvering related to the pursuit of power — some neocons have moved from the far-left to the far-right. Generally, a Neocon is an adherent of a right-wing political philosophy that emerged in the United States in the late 1960s primarily in opposition to the New Left and, later in reaction to fears over a return to US isolationism in the wake of the Vietnam War. It is not limited to the USA and gained momentum with the cold-war, particularly under President Reagan and could be said to have achieved some purchase on the US government with President George W. Bush's administration.

http://www.neoconeurope.eu/What_is_a_Neocon%3F

  Origin

Its origins are traced to the political convolutions of 1930s Jewish émigré intellectual scene in New York, and to a certain extent the movement remains predominantly Jewish in its composition and concerns. (Commentary, the movement's flagship journal, is published by the American Jewish Committee) although contradictions and exceptions abound. Neocons reflect a minority position within the US Jewish community as most Jews remain distinctly liberal in their social, political and foreign-policy outlook. The emergence of support by factions within the Israeli state, particularly through the Jonathan Institute[1] is central to understanding the Neocon's foreign policy preferences of unilateralism, large military expenditures and the disdain for International law and organisations such as the United Nations.

In retrospect this émigré intellectual scene contained some of the future luminaries of the movement — Max Shachtman, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Irving Kristol and Irving Howe — who mostly began their careers as the leading lights (if not members) of the Trotskyist left. Their radical anti-Stalinism gave way at the end of WWII to liberal anti-Communism and clandestine co-operation with the CIA notably with the Congress on Cultural Freedom with the view of concocting a surrogate left. However, at the end of the Vietnam war the neocons abandoned liberalism to evolve into their present disposition as 'neo'-conservatives. Heilbrunn observes the ideological peregrinations:

    First they abandoned Judaism, trading it in for a cosmopolitan brand of Marxism, before fleeing it for liberalism. Then they turned against liberalism and embraced conservatism. Now they may be on the outs with the conservative movement.[2]

Their roots in the pre-war Trotskyite left is reflected in the neocon's polemical and organisational skills and their ideological zeal and ends-justify-the-means duplicity. As Irving Kristol, the godfather of the movement, remarked, a Neocon is a 'liberal who was mugged by reality'.[3] Jacob Heilbrunn describes neoconservatism as: "a mindset, one that has been decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and by the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism".[4]Military historian, Andrew J. Bacevich has referred to the Neo-conservatives as constituting one of the "interest groups [that] have contributed to the new militarism [...] Neo-conservatives literally see no limits or constraints on the U.S. use of force. While some Americans supported the Iraq War and others opposed it, only the neocons rhapsodized about it."[5] Nathen Glazer also emphasizes this aspect: 'The definition of a neoconservative is someone who wasn't a conservative'.[6] Max Boot, mystyfied that he had been described as a "neocon," wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the term "has clearly come unmoored from its original meaning," and stated that:

    ...it is not really domestic policy that defines neoconservatism. This was a movement founded on foreign policy, and it is still here that neoconservatism carries the greatest meaning, even if its original raison d'être — opposition to communism — has disappeared.[7]

Possibly as a consequence of the military failure in Vietnam, in the late 1970s the Neocons feared an inward looking US might abandon Israel in the middle-East. Nixon and Kissinger's detente towards Soviet Russia and the turn towards disarmament, possibly encouraged Neocon fears dovetailed with the ever-present concern of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) that its future profits were under threat. It was thus, according to journalist Andrew Cockburn's simplified version of events, that the Neoconservative movement was born as the nexus of the Israel lobby with the MIC at the instigation of Paul Nitze.[8]
Ideology

According to Irwin Stelzer, the neocon position can be summed up as 'diplomacy if possible, force if necessary; the UN if possible, ad hoc coalitions or unilateral action if necessary, preemptive strikes if it is reasonable to anticipate hostile action on the part of America's enemies' (quoted in Smith, 2006: 19). What sets neoconservatism apart from traditional conservatism, writes political scientist Wendy Brown, is the 'open affirmation of moralized state power in the domestic and international sphere' (2006). While neoconservatives have formed strategic alliances with both the Christian Right and neoliberal capitalists, their commitment to religion and untrammeled markets is far from unqualified. While neoconservatives are noticeably secular in their world view (notwithstanding the rhetoric of good-and-evil), they recognize the functional role of religion in society in providing an ethical and disciplinary focus and instilling deference to authority. In the economic sphere, while the celebration of capitalism is a recurring motif in their writings, many neoconservatives' remain committed New Dealers (as was Henry "Scoop" Jackson, whose office served as an incubator for many of today's prominent neoconservatives). However, the neoconservatives political journey, writes Sidney Blumenthal, 'cannot be explained simply by reference to a calibrated ideological scale'.

    Although they are frequently inclined to the formulaic, they are less coherent as an intellectual movement than a social group. Some are welfare-statists, others are free-marketeers; some proclaim the moral mission of America in global terms, others urge hardheaded realpolitik. What really binds them together is their common experience.[9]

This incoherence in neoconservative thinking is also evidence in the approach of two major figures towards Machiavelli: whereas Leo Strauss found his realistic depiction of the mechanics of power anathema, paving the way for modern liberalism, Michael Ledeen holds the Florentine philosopher in high regard, fashioning himself as a latter-day apostle.[10]