Posted on 22-4-2003
The
New Conservatives Have Arrived
by Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, Le Monde,Tuesday
15 April 2003
Who are these Neoconservatives who play an essential role in
the United States President's choices alongside the Christian
Fundamentalists? And who were their master thinkers, Albert
Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss ?
It was said in a tone of sincere praise: "You are some
of the best brains in the country''; so good, added George W.
Bush, that "my government employs twenty of you''. The
President addressed the American Enterprise Institute in Washington
on February 26 (See Le Monde of March 20). He was honoring a
"Think Tank'' that is one of the bastions of the American
Neoconservative movement. He saluted a school of thought
that marks his administration and declared all that he owes
to the intellectual current of predominant influence today.
He recognized that he is surrounded by Neoconservatives and
credited them with an essential role in his political choices.
In the beginning of the sixties, John F. Kennedy recruited from
the center left, notably from Harvard University, certain professors
chosen from "the best and the brightest" - to take
up the expression of essayist David Halberstam. President
George Bush would himself govern with those, who, starting in
the sixties, lashed out from the stretchers of this centrist
consensus with a social democratic coloration, then dominant.
Who are they? What is their history? Who were their master thinkers?
What are the intellectual sources of Bushian Neo-conservatism?
The Neoconservatives shouldn't be confused with the Christian
Fundamentalists who are also found in George Bush's entourage.
They have nothing to do with the renaissance of Protestant fundamentalism
in the Southern, "Bible Belt'' States which is one of the
rising forces in today's Republican Party. Neo-conservatism
is East Coast and a little Californian also. Its sources of
inspiration have an "intellectual'' profile, often New
Yorkers, often Jewish, who started out "on the left''.
Some still call themselves Democrats. They have a political
or literary magazine in hand, not the Bible; they wear tweed
jackets, not the double-breasted blue green suits of the Southern
televangelists. Usually they profess liberal ideas regarding
social and moral issues. Their goal is neither to prohibit abortion
nor to impose prayer in the schools. Their ambition is
other.
However, explains Pierre Hassner, the singularity of the Bush
administration is to have assured a conjunction of these two
currents. George W. Bush has made Neoconservatives and Christian
fundamentalists live together. The latter are represented in
the government by a man like John Ashcroft, the Attorney General.
The former have one of their stars as Deputy Defense Secretary,
Paul Wolfowitz. George W. Bush, who campaigned from the center
right without any very precise political anchorage, has realized
a surprising and explosive ideological cocktail, marrying Wolfowitz
and Ashcroft, Neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalists,
two opposite planets.
Ashcroft taught at Bob-Jones University, in South Carolina,
academically unknown, but a stronghold of Protestant fundamentalism.
Jewish, from a family of scholars, Wolfowitz is a brilliant
product of the East Coast universities. He studied with two
of the most eminent professors of the sixties, Allan Bloom,
the disciple of German Jewish philosopher, Leo Strauss, and
Albert Wohlstetter, mathematics professor and military strategy
specialist. These two names were to count. The Neoconservatives
have placed themselves in the tutelary shadow of the strategist
and the philosopher.
"Neoconservative'' is a misnomer, as they have nothing
in common with people who want to guarantee the established
order. They reject virtually all the attributes of conservatism
as it is understood in Europe. Francis Fukuyama, one of
them, who became famous for his essay, "The End of History'',
declares:'' The Neoconservatives have no interest in defending
the present order, founded on hierarchy, tradition, and a pessimistic
view of human nature'' (Wall Street Journal of December
24, 2002).
Idealist-optimists, convinced of the universal value of the
American model of democracy, they want to put an end to the
status quo, to a flabby consensus. They believe in politics
to change things. On the domestic front, they draw their
critique of the Welfare State, a product of Presidencies both
Democratic (Kennedy, Johnson) and Republican (Nixon), which
tries to solve social problems. In foreign policy, they denounced
detente in the seventies, which, they claimed, profited the
USSR more than the West. Critical of the sixties' balance sheet
and the diplomatic realism of a Henry Kissinger, they are anti-establishment.
Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, founder of the review,
Commentary, two of the godfathers of Neo-conservatism, come
from the left. They formulated a leftist critique of Soviet
communism.
In "Ni Marx ni Jesus" ("Neither Marx nor Jesus'')
(1970, Robert Laffont), Jean-François Revel described an America
plunging in the waves of the social revolution of the sixties.
He explains Neo-conservatism today as a way of turning back
the clock: on the domestic front, first of all. The Neoconservatives
criticize, in Leo Strauss' wake, the cultural and moral relativism
of the sixties. For them, this relativism will culminate in
the "political correctness'' of the eighties.
Another serious intellectual comes into the fray here, Allan
Bloom, of the University of Chicago, whom his friend Saul Bellow
depicted in his novel, "Ravelstein'' (Gallimard, 2002).
In 1987, in "The Closing of the American Mind", Bloom
assails a university milieu in which everything is of equal
value: "Everything has become culture'', he wrote; "drug
culture, rock culture, gang culture in the street and so on
and so forth, without the least discrimination. The failure
of culture has become a culture.''
For Bloom, like his master Strauss, a great interpreter of classical
texts, a part of the inheritance of the sixties "ends up
as contempt of Western civilization for itself,'' explains Jean-François
Revel. " In the name of political correctness every culture
is as good as another and Bloom questioned those students and
professors perfectly disposed to accept non European cultures,
frequently abusive of liberties, and who demonstrated at the
same time an extreme severity towards Western culture, refusing
to acknowledge its superiority in any matter.''
While "political correctness'' gave the impression of owning
the highway, the Neoconservatives scored points. Bloom's book
was an immense success. In foreign policy a true Neoconservative
school took shape. Networks were established. In the seventies,
the Democratic Senator from the state of Washington, Henry Jackson
(deceased in 1983) criticized the great nuclear disarmament
agreements. A generation of young people infatuated with strategy
crystallized, including Richard Perle and William Kristol, who
had taken Allan Bloom's courses.
In and out of the administration, Richard Perle would encounter
Paul Wolfowitz, both of them working for Kenneth Adelman, another
detractor of detente policies, or Charles Fairbanks, Under-Secretary
of State. In strategic matters, their intellectual mentor was
Albert Wohlstetter. Researcher at the Rand Corporation, Consultant
to the Pentagon, and besides, a great gastronomic specialist,
Wohlstetter (who died in 1997)is one of the fathers of American
nuclear doctrine.
More precisely, he is the source of the rethinking of the traditional
doctrine, known as "mutually assured destruction'' (MAD),
the basis of deterrence. According to this theory, since
both of the two blocks had the power to inflict irreparable
damage on the other, those in power would hesitate to unleash
nuclear arms. For Wohlstetter and his students,
MAD was at once immoral - because of the destruction that could
be wrought on civilian populations-and inefficient: it finished
in a mutual neutralization of nuclear arsenals. No sane statesman,
and, in any case, no American President, would decide for "reciprocal
suicide''. Wohlstetter proposed instead "staggered deterrence'',
i.e. acceptance of limited wars, eventually with tactical nuclear
weapons, with "smart'' high-precision weapons, capable
of targeting the enemy's military dispositions and installations.
He criticized the joint nuclear arms control policy with Moscow.
According to him, it would amount to tying up the United States'
technical creativity in order to maintain an artificial balance
with the USSR.
Ronald Reagan listened to him and launched the "Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI), baptized "Star Wars'', ancestor
of the Anti-Missile Defense System, advocated by Wohlstetter's
pupils, who became the warmest partisans of a unilateral renunciation
of the ABM Treaty, which, in their eyes, impeded the United
States from developing its own defense systems. And they
convinced George W. Bush.
On the path of Perle and Wolfowitz, one also meets Elliott Abrams,
responsible today for the Middle-East in the White House's National
Security Council, and Douglas Feith, an Under-Secretary of Defense.
They all share an unconditional support for the policy of the
State of Israel, whatever government is in place in Jerusalem.
This unwavering support explains their unflinching position
behind Ariel Sharon. President Ronald Reagan's two mandates
(1981 and 1985) gave a number of them the opportunity to exercise
governmental responsibility for the first time.
In Washington, the Neoconservatives wove their web. Creativity
is their forte. Over the years, they have marginalized center
or democratic center left intellectuals to occupy a predominant
position where the ideas are forged that dominate the political
landscape. Magazines such as "National Review'', "Commentary'',
"The New Republic'', once directed by the young "Straussien"
Andrew Sullivan ; "The Weekly Standard'', a property of
the Murdoch Group, whose television station Fox News assures
the diffusion of a vulgarized version of Neoconservative thinking.
Editorial pages like those of the "Wall Street Journal'',
which, under Robert Bartley's responsibility, distribute Neoconservative
militancy without compunction. There are the Research institutes,
the famous "think tanks'', such as the Hudson Institute,
the Heritage Foundation, or the American Enterprise Institute.
There are families also: the son of Irving Kristol, the very
urbane William Kristol of "The Weekly Standard'' ; a son
of Norman Podhoretz worked for the Reagan Administration; the
son of Richard Pipes - a Polish Jew who emigrated to the US
in 1939, Harvard professor and one of the biggest critics of
Soviet Communism-, Daniel Pipes, denounces in Islam the new
Totalitarianism threatening the West.
These men are not isolationists, on the contrary. They
generally have a vast culture and knowledge of foreign countries.
They speak foreign languages. They have nothing to do
with the reactionary populism of a Patrick Buchanan, who preaches
American retreat to its own domestic problems.
The Neoconservatives are internationalists, partisans of a resolute
activism of the United States in the world. They are not in
the style of the old Republican Party (Nixon, George Bush the
Elder), trusting in the merits of "Realpolitik'', little
interested in the nature of the regimes with which the United
States created alliances to defend its interests. A Kissinger
is an "anti-model'' for them. However, they are not internationalists
in the Wilsonian democratic tradition either (so-called after
President Woodrow Wilson, unhappy father of the League of Nations),
that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. These they judge naïve
to count on international institutions to spread democracy.
After the strategist, the philosopher. There are no direct links
between Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss, deceased in 1973
before the official appearance of Neo-conservatism. However,
within the network of Neoconservatives, some have linked the
teachings of the two men, even though their areas of research
had been fundamentally different.
By filiation or by derivation (Allan Bloom, Paul Wolfowitz,
William Kristol...), Strauss' philosophy has served as the Neoconservative
theoretical substratum. Strauss virtually never wrote about
current politics or international relations. He was read
and recognized for his immense erudition about Greek classical
texts, and Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sacred writings. He
was honored for the power of his interpretive methods. "He
succeeded in grafting classical philosophy with German depth
into a country without much philosophic tradition", explains
Jean-Claude Casanova, whose teacher, Raymond Aron, sent to study
in the United States. Aron greatly admired Strauss, whom he
had met in Berlin before the war. He counseled several of his
students, such as Pierre Hassner, or several years later, Pierre
Manent, to turn towards Strauss.
Leo Strauss was born in Kirchhain, in Hesse, in 1899, and left
Germany just before Hitler's rise to power. After a brief
stay in Paris, then England, he came to New York, where he taught
at the New School of Social Research before founding the Committee
on Social Thought, which became the crucible of the "Straussians"
in Chicago.
It would be simplistic and reductive to reduce Leo Strauss'
teaching to several principles which the Neoconservatives surrounding
George W. Bush could draw from. Besides which, Neo-conservatism
roots plunge into traditions other than the Strauss school.
However, the reference to Strauss forms a background pertinent
to the Neo-conservatism at work in Washington today. It permits
an understanding of how Neo-conservatism is not just a simple
insanity of a few hawks; to what extent it is based on theoretical
foundations which may be contestable, but are certainly not
mediocre. Neo-conservatism is situated at the junction
of two reflections present in Leo Strauss.
The first is related to his personal experience. As a
young man, he lived the dissolution of the Weimar Republic under
the converging extreme attacks of the Communists and the Nazis.
He concluded that democracy had no ability to impose itself
if it stayed weak and refused to stand up to tyranny, which
is expansionist in nature, even if that meant resorting to force:
"The Weimar republic was weak. It had only one moment of
strength, if not of grandeur: its violent reaction to the assassination
of the Jewish Foreign Affairs Minister, Walther Rathenau in
1922'' wrote Strauss in a Foreword to Spinoza's "Critique
of Religion''. " Overall (Weimar) presented the spectacle
of justice without power, or of a justice incapable of resorting
to power.''
The second reflection is related to his frequentation of the
Ancients. For us as for them, the fundamental question is that
of the political regime which fashions people's character. Why
had the twentieth century produced two totalitarian regimes,
which Strauss, referring back to Aristotle's terminology preferred
to call "tyrannies''? Strauss' response to this question
which provokes contemporary intellectuals: modernity provoked
a rejection of moral values, of the virtue that is the basis
for democracy, and a rejection of the European values of "reason''
and "civilization''. The source of this rejection, he argued,
is to be found in the Enlightenment, which produced, almost
as a necessity, historicism and relativism, which is to say
the refusal to admit the existence of a higher Good, reflected
in concrete , immediate, and contingent goods, but not reducible
to them, an Unattainable Good that must be the measurement standard
for real goods.
Translated into the terms of political philosophy, this relativism
has as an extreme consequence the theory, much in vogue in the
1960s and 70s, of convergence between the United States and
the Soviet Union. It led at the limit to recognition of moral
equivalence between American democracy and Soviet communism.
However, for Leo Strauss, there are good and bad regimes; political
reflection should not debar value judgment and good regimes
have the right -even the duty- of defending themselves against
the evil ones. It would be simplistic to operate an immediate
transposition of this idea and the "axis of evil'' denounced
by George W. Bush. However, it is clear that it comes
from the same source.
This central notion of the regime as the womb of political philosophy
was developed by the "Straussians'' who have occupied themselves
with the Constitutional history of the United States. Strauss
himself- also an admirer of the British Empire and of Winston
Churchill, as an example of a Statesman with a will- thought
that American democracy was the least bad political system.
No better system had been found for the flourishing of the human
being, even if special interests have a tendency to replace
virtue as the foundation of the system.
However, above all, his students Walter Berns, Hearvey Mansfield,
or Harry Jaffa, nourished the American Constitutionalist School.
They see in the institutions of the United States, even more
than the application of the thought of the Founding Fathers,
the realization of superior principles, even, for a man such
as Harry Jaffa, of Biblical teaching. In any case, religion,
eventually civil, must serve as the cement for institutions
and society. This call to religion was not foreign to
Strauss, but this Jewish atheist, "amused himself in covering
his tracks'' according to Georges Balandier's expression; he
considered religion useful to maintain the illusions of the
many, illusion without which order could not be maintained.
In the end, however, the philosopher must conserve his critical
spirit and address himself to a small number in coded language,
subject to interpretation, intelligible to a meritocracy founded
on virtue.
Advocating a return to the Ancients against the traps of modernity
and the illusions of progress, Strauss nevertheless defends
liberal democracy, child of the Enlightenment- and American
democracy , which seems to be its quintessence. Contradiction?
Without doubt, but a contradiction that he assumes in the tradition
of other liberal thinkers (Montesquieu, Tocqueville) since the
criticism of liberalism, which risks losing itself in relativism-
if all can be said, the search for Truth loses its value-, is
indispensable for its survival. For Strauss, the relativism
of the Good has as a consequence an inability to react to tyranny.
This active defense of democracy and of liberalism reappears
in the political Vulgate as one of the Neo-conservatives' favorite
themes. The nature of political regimes is much more important
than all the international institutions and arrangements for
the maintenance of peace in the world. The greatest threat
comes from States which do not share American democratic values.
Changing these regimes and causing the progress of democratic
values constitutes the best method of reinforcing security (of
the United States) and peace.
The importance of the political regime, panegyrics for militant
democracy, a quasi-religious exaltation of American values and
firm opposition to tyranny: many of the themes which mark the
Neo-conservatives populating the Bush administration can be
drawn from Strauss' teaching, sometimes reviewed and corrected
by the second generation "Straussians''. One thing separates
them from their putative master: the optimism tainted with Messianism
that the Neo-conservatives deploy to bring freedoms to the world
(in the Middle-East today, yesterday in Germany and Japan) as
though political voluntarism could change human nature. This
is another illusion that is perhaps good to spread among the
masses, but which the philosopher himself must not be taken
in by.
There remains a puzzle: how did "Straussism", which
was at first founded on an oral transmission largely tributary
of the master's charisma and which was expressed in austere
books, texts about texts, establish its influence on a Presidential
administration? Pierre Manent, who directs the Paris Raymond-Aron
Research Center, advances the idea that the ostracism to which
Leo Strauss' students were subject in American University circles
pushed them towards public service, "think tanks'' and
the press. There, they are relatively over-represented.
Another-complementary-explanation follows from the intellectual
void that succeeded the end of the Cold War, which the "Straussians'',
and consequent to them, the Neo-conservatives, seemed the best
prepared to fill. The fall of the Berlin Wall demonstrated they
were right to the extent that Ronald Reagan's muscular policy
vis a vis the USSR precipitated its disintegration. The attacks
of September 11 confirmed their thesis of the vulnerability
of democracy in the face of the diverse forms of tyranny.
From the war in Iraq, they will be tempted to draw the conclusion
that the reversal of "evil'' regimes is possible and desirable.
Faced with this temptation, calls to international law can claim
moral legitimacy, but what they lack, in the absence of a new
order, are the powers of conviction and constraint.
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