It is not much easier for Americans than for the French to make sense of the neo-cons. Certainly they are not conservative in the Burkean sense that defined the term for almost two hundred years. They do not seek to hold on to the preponderant part of the past. They make no effort to hide their determination to tear their world up by the roots and revert to an imagined olden time that few if any of them have ever experienced. The New Deal nation is now three-quarters of a century old. It is the only past that Americans alive today have ever experienced. The neo-cons mean to eradicate it altogether. That is radical, not conservative.This is an important and relevant observation. The merger of so-called "traditional values" and a robber-baron perspective on the virtues of the free market is a very intellectually contradictory mix.
Or, at any rate, it would be radical if it was not so palpably incoherent. One major strand of the movement celebrates what neo-cons call family values and traditional morality. The other extols what they call the free market, which undermines those values and that morality more corrosively than any of the liberal ideas and institutions against which neo-cons rail.
Unfortunately, Zuckerman isn't consistent himself in his description of that issue. He later writes that "so far from decaying, both evangelical religion and free-market economics are more influential now than they ever have been before in American history." Aside from the assertion being highly questionable for both evangelical Christianity and laissez faire economic ideas, it also points to the fact that both a conservative brand of religion promoting "traditional family values" has in fact prospered in recent decades along with a tendency to let private corporations run wild at the expense of the public interest.
Zuckerman also discusses "neo-cons" as though he is speaking about the dominant ideology of the Republican Party. And his comparisons are really of today's Republican Party ideologies to his version of earlier American conservatism. Still, it winds up being confusing. Because he does not restrict neoconservatism to the more usual group of adherents of Commentary magazine, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Straussian political thought and a foreign policy based on preventive war and the threat of preventive war.
At one point, Zuckerman seems to argue that the reason neoconservatism (as he broadly defines it) is intellectually confused because the American conservative tradition is itself incoherent:
Much of the intellectual incoherence of the neo-cons is of their own making. But some of it is not. Staking out a neo-conservative stance is not easy when there is so little conservatism on which to draw. ...And yet he identifies a particular 20th-century conservative tradition on which today's Republicans draw:
In other words, the neo-cons are far more neo than con. They cannot trace an iheritance that runs back to the founding [of the US].
It is an odd sort of conservatism that has so little to conserve. So far from connecting with the past, the neo-cons ignore it, or fabricate a fantasy of it. So far from cherishing the deposit of time, they aim to destroy it. They take their essential energy from their antagonism to the New Deal.Today's Republican ideologues on business policy in fact do have a conservative tradition, the e coli conservatism of the Calvin Coolidge days when Andrew Mellon served as Secretary of the Treasury.
But this doesn't necessarily apply to the Commentary/AEI neoconservatives, the group to which that label is more often applied. In the 1970s, what we now call neoconservatives in the more narrow sense were known as "Scoop Jackson Democrats", very hawkish on foreign policy and heavily influenced by the first-strike strategies of nuclear war, but moderate to liberal on domestic matters and not especially concerned with Christian fundamentalist social issues. That crowd has a more recent tradition, the tradition of the most devout Cold Warriors. And they have carried the Cold War view of the world now for nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hearing them talk about "Al Qa'ida" as though it is equivalent or even more powerful to the nuclear-armed Soviet Union is sometimes vividly bizarre.
Zuckerman's article is based around a comparison of today's Republican Party thinking to that of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists in the early days of the Republic. He presents the comparison in a way that makes the Republicans look un-conservative in the Hamiltonian sense. But his framing of the politics of the early US is one that is widespread but highly flawed. My unsympathetic but brief version of that framing is that it presents Hamilton as the chief proponent in the early years of the Constitution as an advocate of activist federal government. While Thomas Jefferson is seen in this view as a backward-looking advocate of states rights and limited government. Zuckerman writes that Hamilton "utilized the vapid Constitutional authorization to 'provide for the common defense and general welfare' as sweepingly and as skillfully as any New Dealer ever did." (my emphasis)
It's true that the politics of the early Republic are difficult to compare directly with today's. But in the context of their time, Hamilton represented a very conservative viewpoint. He was basically a monarchist and thought that the Executive had to dominate the Congress, which he feared as irresponsible and far too democratic. Jefferson's opposition to the famous Bank of the United States successfully championed by Hamilton was based on Hamilton's conception of using the Bank to be an instrument of corruption to Congress, which in fact it became. Jefferson said that while Hamilton himself was personally incorruptible, he believed that the only way the Constitutional government could run effectively was via massive corruption of the Congress. Hamilton very much believed that government should be run by and for the wealthy. In pursuit of that goal, he relied on some governmental tools that by a selective and abstract reference to them, Zuckerman today can claim were things that "today's conservatives anathematize", such as "enhancement of the central government at the expense of the states."
It is as much true of the present-day ideologies of today's Democratic Party what Zuckerman says of the Republicans, "They cannot trace an inheritance that runs back to the founding." But only if we take it in the sense that times have changed so that particular positions such as the need for a central bank have very different implications today than they did during the George Washington administration. So cherry-picking individual positions, as Zuckerman does in this essay with Jefferson's views on slavery, can create a very misleading picture of the guiding political ideas of the Founders.
Tags: michael zuckerman, neoconservatives
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