<PN>Part I

~~<PT>~~Conservative Moralist Stories

<CN>1

<CT>THE NEOCONSERVATIVE STORIES: The Sixties and the Cold WarNeoconservative Stories: The ’60s and the Cold War

<TX>On September 11, 2001, as Americans watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center fall to the ground, it seemed that nothing in American life would ever be the same again. Now, looking back in the rear- view mirror of history, it appears that some things have changed dramatically. But some things have stayed pretty much the same.

One great change is the rise of the neoconservatives. Before 9/11, neocons already held most of the policymaking posts in the George W. Bush administration. That day’s tragedy gave them the political strength to dominate U.S. foreign policy for the first time. But Bush’s neocon advisors did not change their views or develop a new approach to the world in the wake of the unexpected attack. They saw no need for that. They already had a full range of policies, and a complex set of stories to explain those policies, set to go. They had been telling their stories for years, waiting for a chance to implement their policies. Nothing had changed for them but the political climate, which finally gave them a chance to act.

Since their stories blended so well with Bush’s more traditional conservative stories, the president could become their most effective spokesman and storyteller. The two conservatisms, the old and the “neo,” were fused by the horrific events of September 11. Together, they gave birth to the war on terrorism and to the insecurity it breeds. The deepest roots of that insecurity are ~~not~~ to be found not in the events of 9/11 but in the conservative and neoconservative stories, which were kindled to a newly powerful life by the flames of 9/11.

When Americans said that after 9/11 nothing would be the same again, they were often expressing a new and overwhelming sense of insecurity. Now, it seemed, for the first time, daily life would be lived under the shadow of a terrifying threat. For the neoconservatives, this too was only more of the same. Their story about America told them that the nation had long faced a terrifying threat that imperiled its way of life. It had come, in part, from abroad—until 1991, from the Kremlin, the headquarters of global communism. In 2001, they could hold on to their familiar story about a foreign threat, simply substituting ~~“terrorist”~~terrorist for ~~“communist.”~~communist.

But the neocon story traced the deepest roots of threat much closer to home, in the cultural transformations that rocked U.S. society in the 1960s. In their version of history, the pernicious influence of the ‘’60s was still eroding the moral fabric of American life. In response to 9/11, they simply took their story about radical threats against traditional values at home and projected it onto a global scale, treating enemies foreign and domestic as two different heads of the same monster. That twin-headed monster still posed a dire peril in the twenty-first ~~21^st~~ century, neocons warned. The insecurity that had haunted American life since the ‘’60s continued unabated. That had not changed at all.

What did change on September 11 was the influence that this neoconservative story could wield. With only minor changes, it became a story about a war against terrorism, a war with no end in sight. The insecurity that neocons had taken for granted since the ‘’60s would now be shared by the vast majority of the American people. To understand America’s national insecurity and its war on terrorism, which can never relieve the insecurity but ~~can~~ only heighten it, the first step is to understand the neoconservative story.

<A>what is a neoconservative?what Is a Neoconservative?

<TX>No one can say for sure just what a neoconservative is, not even the neocons themselves. Irving Kristol, widely acknowledged as the pioneer, leader, and “godfather” of the movement, once wrote that it’s not a movement in the a conventional political sense. Neoconservatism “holds no meetings, has no organizational form, has no specific programmatic goals, and when two neoconservatives meet they are more likely to argue with one another than to confer or conspire.”[1] So their story has many different versions. Yet there is some common ground. There are some threads that tie together all their stories and mark them as distinctively neoconservative.

Gary Dorrien, a leading scholar of the movement, has defined it as “an intellectual movement originated by former leftists” that promotes “a return to traditional cultural values,” such as patriotism, individualism, free market capitalism, heterosexuality, monogamy, deferred gratification, and deference to the authority of males, elders, teachers, rulers, and Western culture. ~~More s~~Specifically, Dorrien finds the following ~~these~~ values at the top of the neocon agenda:

<BL>•the rule of traditional elites

•condemnation of ~~condemning~~ feminism, affirmative action, multiculturalism

•gratitude to America

•militant anticommunism

•the superiority of capitalism and capitalist modernization

•a minimal welfare state[2]

<TX>After the cold war ended, Dorrien dropped “militant anticommunism” from his list, since it was no longer relevant. In their careful study of the movement, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke claim that the end of the cold war spawned a brand new kind of neoconservatism, “an entirely new political animal,” [3] with no real connection to the neocons of earlier decades.

This view goes too far. In fact, when Halper and Clarke list the central concerns of the post-–cold war movement, they name features that marked the movement long before the 1990s:

<BL>•support~~ing~~ of democratic allies

•challenging of evildoers who defy American values

•America’s total responsibility for global order

•~~the~~ promotion of political and economic freedom everywhere

•increased spending on defense[4]

<TX>In another list, the same authors identify more neocon fundamentals that are quite distinct from the main post–cold war ~~post-cold-war~~ themes:

<BL>•stressing on the need to choose constantly between good and evil

•making a willingness to confront evil the test of political character

•analyzing international issues in absolute, black-and-white ~~absolute~~ moral categories

•assuming that relations between states depend on military power[5]

<TX>These themes, along with the ones on Dorrien’s list, have always been important features of neoconservatism. So has another point that Halper and Clarke note: nNeocons “show little or no interest in the economic implications of their policies.” (Michael Lind, a former editor of Irving Kristol’s journal The National Interest, agrees that their policies do “not reflect business interests in any direct way. … Explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken.”) All these common themes suggest that there is an enduring unity in the movement from its inception to the present day.[6]

However, the early neocons did not focus primarily on the international arena. In fact, they did not focus at all on specific political policies, foreign or domestic~~, at all~~. Rather, they were most concerned—and the movement has remained vitally concerned—about the one area that is common to all these lists of essentials: demonstrating moral strength by combatting evil, in order to preserve traditional values. This is the central thread that has run through the neoconservative weave from beginning to end, from their war against radicalism in the 1960s to their war against terrorism today.

<A>THE threat of the 1960s COUNTERCULTUREThe Threat of the 1960s Counterculture

<TX>The best way to understand the neoconservative stories is to begin at the beginning. Neoconservatism is new and different from old-fashioned conservatism because it began with a group of left-wing radicals who rejected their left-leaning views n the 1960s and turned to the political right. They rallied to the defense of traditional values because they saw those values under an attack more fierce than any they had ever imagined. “If there is any one thing that neoconservatives are unanimous about, it is their dislike of the counterculture,” Irving Kristol once wrote. Another guiding light of the early movement, Norman Podhoretz, agreed: “Revulsion against the counterculture accounted for more converts to neoconservativism than any other single factor. This revulsion was not only directed against the counterculture itself; it was also inspired by the abject failure of the great institutions of the liberal community to resist the counterculture.”[7]

Most of the early neocons had spent the 1950s and early ‘’60s as ardent cold war liberals, supporting the Democratic Party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. The Vietnam war era presented them with a great crisis. Young people chanted, “Make love, not war.” The Democratic Party, influenced by the peace movement and the counterculture, turned so far to the left that these moderate liberals no longer recognized it. They found themselves in a society that they could not make sense of. “It was the fundamental assumptions of contemporary liberalism,” Kristol confesses, “that were my enemy.”[8] Since the neocons were generally writers and intellectuals, they instinctively turned to words to make sense out of the confusion. In lectures and essays, they articulated their beliefs about what was going wrong in America and what could set it right. They promoted a new story, trying their best to reshape reality to match their own ideas.

According to the neocon story, the United States was transformed by the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and it has never again been the same. People stopped living by traditional values. Society gave license to forces that had previously been tightly constrained: women, racial and ethnic minorities, socialists, pacifists. Above all, the forces of desire were released, both in drug-enhanced imagination and in physical bodies. Indeed, “everything is now permitted,” Kristol complained. “The inference is that one has a right to satisfy one’s appetites without delay.” To Podhoretz, this rush of desire reflected an underlying refusal to grow up and accept the responsibilities of becoming a mature self. It must have come from a very deep “self-hatred and self-contempt.”[9]

The neocon story, beginning with this alarming view of social change, jumped quickly from change to threat. The counterculture was based on the idea that “the individual must be free to create his own morality,” Kristol claimed. Under the reign of this “self-centered hedonism,” the United States lost its sense of moral purpose and its authentic religious values. Society’s institutions were “inexorably drained of their legitimacy.” The counterculture “constructed a supermarket of possible good and decent lives. This is a prescription for moral anarchy, which is exactly what we are now experiencing. … The idea of ordered liberty could collapse.”[10]

Indeed, Kristol charged, the new radicalism pushed individual liberty beyond anarchy to nihilism.[11] It permitted everything and believed in nothing. All the traditional boundaries—between right and wrong, virtue and sin, male and female, possible and impossible—were blurred or even erased. Every traditional institution came under attack: the government, the churches and synagogues, even the heterosexual family. Podhoretz went so far as to accuse liberals of a “sluttish antinomianism”—a rejection of all rules—because they believed that great powers could no longer impose their will on other nations, which meant that “nobody was in charge” of the world. In practical terms, this fostered a multiculturalism that was nothing but “a vulgar plot to undermine Western civilization itself.” “The infection grew and spread,” he lamented, “until it reached the proportions of an epidemic … a spiritual plague.”[12]

According to neocon sociologist Nathan Glazer, radicals believed that “members of the middle class do not deserve to hold on to their property, their positions, or even their lives.” The counterculture aimed to destroy them all, Kristol claimed, leaving only “freedom, confusion, and disorientation, all embellished with a veneer of ‘equality.’”[13]

The neoconservatives have continued to voice the same complaints against the radicals. Brigitte and Peter Berger, sympathetic scholarly observers of the movement, put it bluntly: nNeoconservatives oppose “the sudden descent of the elite culture and political liberalism into an orgy of utopian lunacies. … The lunacies have become organized into a cultural and political establishment.” The left-leaning establishment will not nurture the inner strength needed for self-control, the argument goes. Since leftists respect no boundaries, they see no reason to take strong stands on anything; it’s all relative, they say. They no longer even care about winning the contests of life. In fact, they revel in their weakness, which is why they idealize the feminine. Neocons are especially sensitive to gender issues; Podhoretz complains that “the plague … rages as fiercely as ever … among the kind of women who do not wish to be women and among those men who do not wish to be men.”[14]

The countercultural attack on traditional boundaries and competition is an attack on capitalism, too, Kristol contends: “If you delegitimate the bourgeois society, the market economy—almost incidentally—is also deligitimated.” The leftists would take away our liberty to compete and be big winners (or losers) in the marketplace. Indeed, they would put a stop to the economic contest altogether, for the sake of trying to make everyone equal. They want to believe that life need not be a contest, that no hard choices need to be made because everyone can have everything. Midge Decter, a rare feminine voice among neocon writers, says bluntly that left-wing feminists simply want “freedom from all difficulty.”[15]

In all these attacks, the neoconservatives are inventing, and then rejecting, an exaggerated and distorted version of the ‘’60s that comes from their fertile, frightened imaginations. Their critique reveals a lot about how and why the movement got started. But it reveals very little about the countercultural radicalism of the 1960s. Step outside the neocon story and things look much less menacing. The counterculture is not nihilistic. There is no vacuum of meaning in it. On the contrary, it attracted so many young people in the ‘’60s—and continues to attract recruits in each new generation—because they find richer meaning by trading in traditional values for new ones: peace, love, sensuality, diversity, ecological harmony, and all the rest. They find strength and freedom not by competing, but by cooperating and developing more sensitivity to the needs of the whole society. They mount a cogent argument that their alternative culture offers a more realistic way of coping with life’s inevitable difficulties.[16]

The neoconservatives profoundly misunderstood the left-wing movements of the ‘’60s. They still do. Why? Because the neocons were not, and are not, interested in truly understanding the people they criticize. They created, and still create, a caricature—a fictitious monster—so that they ~~can~~ could knock it down ~~. They~~ ~~go on the offensive~~ in order to defend their own values and their own view of human nature, which they rightly sawee being called into question. They used their exaggerations to get the seeming security of a clear simple story of right versus wrong and good versus evil.

<A>THE HUMAN CONDITIONThe Human Condition

<TX>~~The neoconservative~~ ~~attack on the counterculture~~ ~~goes far beyond specific political issues~~ Irving. Kristol gets to the heart of the matter when he writes that counterculture radicals saw human nature as “not only originally good, but also incorruptible. … [They] simply cannot bring themselves to think realistically about human nature.” The nation’s problems can be solved only “with a very different view of human nature.” As usual, a neocon writer is distorting the counterculture; counterculture writers who address the issue of human nature often have a more nuanced view that ~~which~~ can certainly claim to be “realistic.”[17]

But Kristol is right that the neocons demanded more than a return to traditional social mores. They wanted a return to the view of human nature underlying those mores. Although Kristol, like many of the early neoconservatives, is Jewish, he found that view spelled out most clearly in Christian theology: “What impressed me most about the Christian theologians was their certainty, derived from the Bible, that the human condition placed inherent limitations on human possibility. Original sin was one way of saying this, and I had no problem with that doctrine.”[18] ~~America, they claimed,~~ ~~could only be saved from the ravages of radicalism only, they claimed, if it accepted the neoconservative view~~ ~~that~~ ~~selfishness and aggression are innate in~~ ~~human nature—“something permanent, inevitable, transcultural, transhistorical.”[19]~~

The early neoconservatives proclaimed that America could be saved from the ravages of radicalism only if everyone accepted something like the idea of original sin. To believe anything else ~~think otherwise~~ ~~was~~ is to deny reality, they insisted. Indeed, the most popular definition of a neoconservative is Kristol’s oft-quoted quip: “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” But the reality they appealed to was not an objective perception. It was an article of faith—an old-fashioned belief that ~~a creation of their own minds~~sin, selfishness, and aggression are innate in everyone—“something permanent, inevitable, transcultural, transhistorical.”[20]. They invented, and decried, their own version of the counterculture to defend their own version of reality. As a closer look will show, their ~~ideas about human nature—invented as an antidote to their invented version of the counterculture—~~version of reality starts and ends with a foundation of inescapable insecurity.

“It is crucial to all human beings at all times,” Kristol claims, “that they encounter a world that possesses transcendent meaning, a world in which the human experience makes sense. Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than to experience one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world. … Human beings, especially if they are bereft of institutional guidance and support, can easily lose their balance.”[21]

Why do we need “institutional guidance and support” to live meaningful, balanced lives? “In every society,” Kristol answers, “the overwhelming majority of the people lead lives of considerable frustration.” Frustrated people might seek meaning by rebelling against their condition and try to change their world. However, “to think we have it in our power to change people so as to make the human estate radically better than it is … is an arrogant assumption. … By acting upon this assumption we shall surely end up making our world worse than it need have been.” That’s because people who try to change the world usually end up tearing society’s vital institutions apart, making everyone lose their balance. “If society is to endure,” Kristol continues, “it needs to be able to rely on a goodly measure of stoical resignation.” People have to “find contentment in doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time.” How will they know what is “right”? They’ll follow the traditional views of “right” taught by society. They’ll do things the way they’ve always been done.[22]

Although the story gets more complicated, it is already packed with a tangled web of assumptions and implications. It says that people are generally bound to feel unhappy, because they are battling against a world that won’t ever give them what they want. It pictures life as an endless uphill struggle, a contest that we are bound to lose, sooner or later.

To make things worse, everyone is caught in a catch-22. To get whatever happiness we can, we need to live, work, and play together with other people; we need a society. But the institutions of society are there to support the very limits that make life such an uphill struggle. Most people face limits on what work they can do and how they can do it, how much material comfort they can have, and whom and how they can love, ~~just~~ to name just a few examples. So the society that gives us whatever happiness we can get also puts limits on the kinds of happiness we can get. In the very process of giving happiness, society imposes “considerable frustration” and iensures we can never feel completely happy. In fact, as the neocon story tells it, we will be happiest only when we give up on being truly or completely happy and stoically resign ourselves to accepting society’s structures and limits. Too much freedom leaves both the individual and the community too unbalanced. It offers a tantalizing illusion of happiness that can never be fulfilled. We will be most free from anxiety when we give up the freedom to choose to live in our own way.

This analysis makes life look like a dangerous brew. Some people might be tempted to give up the fight for freedom and happiness by ending their lives. Others might be tempted to break out in rage and destroy the social system that keeps them trapped. Though most people avoid those extremes, everyone is always at risk of losing the daily battle against the world. All those ever-present possibilities make life inherently unbalanced. Whatever meaning and security we get from following society’s ways can be only a thin veneer, covering up the precarious reality of a frustrating, confusing, insecure, and sinful life. ~~As Kristol puts it, “the human condition place[s] inherent limitations on human possibility.”[23]~~

Although Kristol, like many of the early neoconservatives, is Jewish, he is impressed with the classical Christian teaching about the inevitably frustrating limits of the human condition: “Original sin was one way of saying this, and I had no problem with that doctrine.” In fact, summarizing the views of his fellow neocons, he finds the essence of “the ‘neoconservative’ impulse” in the idea that some people are such sinners, they will never do what is right, no matter what conditions they live in. So he rejects the peace movement (“The very notion of a world without war is fantastic”; “The lion shall lie down with the lamb, but not until the Second Coming”). He’s also critical of women’s liberation, because original sin makes all men, “to one degree or another, natural predators when it comes to sex.” Sex needs to be bound by strict rules to protect women, he contends, even if the rules give women lesser rights and power.[24]

Kristol and all the neocons see life as an endless series of competitions. One place they see it clearly is the economic marketplace, where they find capitalism the only system that fits the facts of human nature. Capitalism assumes “a sense of sin” (as neocon theologian Michael Novak put it). Only self-interest gets us to work hard and compete for rewards. Capitalism channels sinful desires into healthy competition, using “self-interest as the engine of economic growth.”[25]

Self-interest is also the fundamental premise of the neoconservative approach to politics. “The only antidote to the plague” of the counterculture, as Podhoretz puts it, is a traditional “politics of interest. … It promises only the satisfactions that come from acting out of respect for oneself and out of responsibility toward those extensions of oneself—one’s family and the groups and communities to which one belongs, whether by birth or by voluntary choice—that an openness to life inevitably creates. This is all the transcendence of self that mortal beings can hope to achieve through action in the public realm.”[26]

<A>Self-Interest, Morality, and Religion

<TX>Pursuing self-interest is not really selfish, as neocons see it. True, some will end up winners and some losers; social stratification, political hierarchy, and insecurity are the price of liberty. But all neocons assume that everyone has an equal chance to get rich—as long as everyone follows the same traditional behavior patterns and plays the competitive game within fixed rules. The first rule of the game, says Kristol, is “to control one’s appetites.” The “traditional spiritual values” of self-interest, self-control, tradition, order, liberty, and equality all go together. The whole package must be embraced as one. That’s the only way to keep the playing field safe. But sinful desires are always pulling us toward an immoral life of self-indulgent rule-breaking, ignoring the demands of social stability to satisfy the impulses of the moment. It takes a strong individual to fight down those impulses and keep them in check.[27]

~~<A>~~~~SELF-INTEREST, MORALITY, AND RELIGION~~S~~elf-Interest, Morality, and Religion~~

~~<TX>~~Most people are not that strong, the neocons assume. They won’t choose self-control on their own. That is why, says Kristol, we need “traditional moral certainties” to set firms bounds on sinful desires. Society needs “a coherence in the private sector achieved through the influence of organized religion, traditional moral values, and the family … those traditional moral values hitherto associated with church and synagogue.”[28] Traditional values are all about controlling sinful desire by channeling it into the competitive marketplace and the defense of family values. (That’s why it’s OK to get vast wealth while others starve, but not OK to get an abortion, no matter how poor you are.) These are the bedrock values that give society the strength to endure, despite the eternal temptations of sin that so often lead us to fall. The kind of strength we need most is the moral strength to accept tradition as our guide at every moment.

In most times and places, people have relied on religion for that bedrock of meaning and security. Another noted neocon, James Q. Wilson, wrote that all “great” religions are basically the same. They “make you aware of the dark forces within you, equip you with the recognition that you need help to manage those forces, supply you with a conviction that such help is available from Somebody or Something provided you submit to Him or It, and lead you to act in accord with natural law.”[29]<~~AU: The title in Note 27 is not listed in the Bibliography; please provide.~~> Religion also helps people feel resigned and contented. It offers a conviction that reality is not a random chaos, but a meaningful order that we can and must follow. It makes the traditional social rules seem right, necessary, and unchangeable. That makes religion a<~~AU: Did you indeed mean “a glue” here?~~> ~~the~~ glue that holds societies together.

Neoconservatives want the satisfactions that religion so often gives. Yet most of them don’t turn to a conventional religion to get it. As Dorrien says, the early neocons “used religious arguments persuasively in their criticisms of sexual promiscuity, the breakdown of family ties, and the erosion of traditional cultural values. They found more difficulty, however, making constructive religious claims beyond these carefully chosen themes.” Even today, he finds, they want a “language of moral absolutism not deriving from any particular religious tradition.” They find it in political language; they tend to be “short on personal religion, but long on giving meaning to their lives through political causes.” In a sense, political ideology has become their faith.[30]

In this arena, as in so many, Irving Kristol is the guiding light of the movement. He sees politics as a crucial arena for solving society’s problems. He admires democracy as the best form of government yet devised. But democracy is not an end in itself, he argues. It is only a means to create a virtuous society. It depends on people choosing to do the right thing by respecting enduring mores and institutions (for example, being strictly heterosexual, privileging Western civilization but avoiding sex education in the schools, making the poor accept menial jobs, offering no special help to minority groups, drinking alcohol but never smoking marijuana). If people are not morally strong enough to make such choices, the government must step in and do what is right regardless of public whims. In the neocon story, the liberal trends stemming from the ‘’60s have sapped most people of their moral fortitude. Since the average American has become too weak to accept traditional rules voluntarily, those rules have to be imposed externally, by law. The government, Kristol insists, cannot “permit people capriciously to corrupt themselves.”[31]

<A>THE PARADOX OF MODERNITYThe Paradox of Modernity

<TX>This is a difficult faith to hold if one wants to be intellectually honest. Irving Kristol is often cited as the spokesman of the original neoconservatives because his writing probes into so many issues with such great intellectual vigor. In fact, he is honest enough to admit that his analysis leads to a kind of intellectual dead end, which seems to undermine his political position.

According to Kristol, today’s American middle-class life is “the most advanced form of the good society attainable within history.” The key to this best- of- all- possible societies is capitalism, because it turns people into virtuous bourgeois citizens. They know that they must compete in the marketplace, Kristol argues; they can’t be winners unless they take the risk of becoming losers. Since they want to be winners, they accept “the merits of deferred gratification,” controlling desire today to get more tomorrow. And they know that they have to submit their selfish desires to conventional moral rules in order to protect society. In other words, the virtuous bourgeoisie have to fight against other people, against the world, and most of all against their own deepest urges. They must wage that battle constantly or they will lose their personal balance, and the society they depend on for their precarious balance may fall apart. That makes them “a people of firm moral convictions, a people of self-reliance and self-discipline.”[32]

However, capitalism has to sell its goods. So it needs consumers who abandon self-discipline and put their material pleasures ahead of morality. By making material prosperity the highest value, capitalism leads bourgeois people into “a religious vacuum,”[33] with no fear of sin. Once sinful desire is freed from the old restraints, Kristol claims, it is insatiable; it won’t respect any boundaries. Since government must support capitalism, it must allow and perhaps encourage people to pursue prosperity above all, even though they are likely to corrupt themselves in the process.

Capitalism can’t respect tradition, either. It needs the innovative, entrepreneurial spirit. Everyone has to have the most possible freedom to compete in the marketplace and challenge every traditional rule. “The main currents of modern thought are all subversive of social stability,” because they assume that “institutions are created by—and legitimated by—human reason, rather than by mere tradition or custom, and certainly not by divine revelation.”[34] Democratic capitalism demands free thought and free desire. But once people can choose which social rules to obey and which to break, society will have no way to control the dangerous forces of sin. Since we are all sinners, and all somewhat frustrated by the results we get from the system, our freedom always tempts us to tear the system—and each other—apart. So bourgeois society has, built into it, the seeds of its own destruction. Capitalism itself breeds the revolt against it.

In the neoconservative story, this is a dire crisis because there are only two possible alternatives: eEither we live according to traditional values or we live without any values at all, a life of utter confusion in social anarchy. Under the reign of anarchy, no one is free to create a meaningful life. But the story admits that modernity and capitalism require us to question traditional values. So they push society toward anarchy, leaving little hope for freedom or security. Even under the best circumstances, every step toward clarity and security in the modern world ends up creating more contradiction, confusion, and insecurity. For everyone who believes in the idea of original sin, this is the huge paradox that looms over modernity, making it the most precarious way of life yet devised. Every day becomes profoundly uncertain. No wonder neocons tend to turn every public issue into a crisis. (For example, calling for censorship of pornography, Kristol warns: “What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less.”) No wonder they tend to turn all the little crises into a single huge crisis. Peter Berger spoke for most of them when he foresaw a “long, long age of darkness. … American society may be swallowed up.”[35]

But the crisis does not come from the forces of social change. It is the neocons’ ~~their~~ story, not reality, that makes tradition or anarchy the only possible alternatives. It’s their story, not reality, that says values are valuable only if they are universally and eternally true. The neocons can’t see how the ‘’60s counterculture’s way of life makes people feel more secure, because they assume that security comes only from living by old traditions. In other words, the counterculture proves the neocons’ story right only because neocons see the ‘’60s through the lens of their own story, which has already cast the counterculture as the villain. The radical left is the monster to be destroyed: tThat’s not the conclusion of the argument, it’s the premise. Of course they see catastrophe looming; that’s just what their story predicts. It’s a circular, self-justifying argument. Precisely because their story defines all rapid change as a threat, it requires and creates a sense of pervasive cultural threat. So it blocks the path to genuine security, just as the story’s contradictions block the path to clarity.

It also blocks the path to recognizing how much things have changed since the 1960s. Veterans of the counterculture often talk about how little impact their era had and how conservative the U.S. has become. But the neocons don’t see it that way at all. For them, the moral stain of the ‘’60s has spread out to engulf the whole nation. They are still fighting much the same cultural battle that Kristol, Podhoretz, and the others set out to fight decades ago. So they are still caught in all the same insecurities. They cope with these dilemmas by clinging more firmly to their story. It seems they cannot feel secure unless they feel surrounded by pervasive threat and insecurity. That’s the only way they can make sense out of their world. By casting the left as the enemy, they convince themselves that their own views are the only valid truth. Putting all the blame on the villains of the tale, they cast themselves as the heroes in the relentless fight to save civilization.

They claim to have not only the saving truth, but the strength and resolve to stand up for it against the immoral trends. As Mark Gerson, a sympathetic scholar of the movement, puts it, their approach to life “requires saying, ‘We are right, and they are wrong!’ in no uncertain terms.”[36] They also assert in no uncertain terms that they are tough enough to make moral demands on themselves and others. They stoutly resist the temptation to blur boundaries and indulge in selfish pleasures.

At least they must tell themselves (and each other) all this to make their story seem real. And they must invent an image of the “’60s radicals” to fight against, to prove that their story is real and that they are strong enough to fight for it. Their story is their only weapon to fend off the feeling that the world is changing so fast, it no longer makes sense to them. If they can believe in their story, they can believe that there is unchanging truth. That may give them the strength to cope with the complexity of the real world. So they have to keep on acting out their story, fighting the battle against “chaos and anarchy,” to prove to themselves that they are strong enough to resist the tides of change.

<A>A STRONG AMERICA ?A Strong America?

<TX>Is that the kind of strength America needs most? Neoconservatives certainly think so. They have done everything in their power to inject their obsession with strength deep into the political life of the nation, in foreign as well as domestic affairs. “While the nation must maintain vigilance toward the enemy outside,” they believe, “it must also demand internal purity against the enemy within.”[37] Historian Edward T. Linenthal wrote those words to sum up the neocon position in the 1970s. But his words describe just as well the view most neocons hold today, as they tell their story of the war on terrorism. The link between domestic and foreign policy is crucial to understanding neoconservatism, past and present.

Peter Steinfels, a historian of the movement, explains that the neocon “emphasis on foreign affairs emerged [in the 1970s] after the New Left and the ‘counterculture’ had dissolved as convincing foils for neoconservativism.” They needed a new actor to take on the role of the enemy. However, Steinfels acknowledges that “domestic and international elements are inextricably mixed in the neoconservative vision.” They must be, because “the essential source of that anxiety is not military or geopolitical or to be found overseas at all; it is domestic and cultural and ideological.” When neocons turned to foreign affairs, they were only playing out the same drama on a different stage. As Midge Decter put it quite candidly, “domestic policy was foreign policy, and vice versa.” Neocon historian Walter Laqueur assured his readers that the kinds of strength involved in foreign and domestic policy were the same: “A confident, dynamic country can play an active part in world affairs and at the same time cope with its internal problems. A people adrift, lacking purpose and conviction, cannot do either.”[38]

The neoconservatives first issued their call for greater military strength to counter the weakness caused, they claimed, by new left-wing ideals at home. Podhoretz reflects their scale of priorities when he writes: “Neoconservatives undertook the job of rebuilding intellectual and moral confidence in the values and institutions on which American society rests, not to mention the actual physical defenses on which the country’s security depends.” As historian Edward Linenthal says, “They feared that America was morally tired and militarily weak after its failure of nerve in Vietnam.” Historian Andrew Bacevich agrees: “American weakness was the problem [for the neocons], not American might. Weakness endangered those who relied on the United States for protection; it also sowed confusion among the American people.”[39]

As neocons saw it, the growing power of the radicals left the U.S. and the whole world adrift in chaos. Political scientist Robert Tucker warned of “a growing disjunction between power and order.” Like all neocons, he assumed that world order is preserved only by military force. As the world’s smaller nations demanded equality, the great military powers, especially the U.S., seemed afraid to make the “effort and sacrifice required to sustain the exercise of power.” So they might “no longer be the principal creators and guarantors of order.” The result, he warned, would be a “drift and uncertainty” in policy that might “lead to chaos.”[40]

Neocons put much of the blame for the rising tide of chaos on antiwar activists, whose hedonism, they charged, was undermining the value of heroic self-sacrifice and weakening the moral authority of the nation and its government. According to Podhoretz, the antiwar “lies” of the ‘’60s radicals were “weapons in a campaign to deprive [America] of the will to defend itself against its enemies in the world outside.” Robert Kagan, a future neocon stalwart, later recalled his experience as a young man, seeing the weakness born of Vietnam breeding later U.S. failures: “It was all—at least as I far as I saw—American weakness, leading to these catastrophes: Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua.” He and his colleagues embraced the ideal of military strength to bolster their complaint that the left was too weak.[41]

They also identified their ideals with “the American way of life” to bolster their claim that the left was anti-American. Podhoretz decried what he saw as the left’s “hostility to one’s own country and its putatively middle-class way of life, and derision of the idea that it stands for anything worth defending.” “What finally alienated me from the radical movement of the ‘’60s,” he recalls, “was its hatred of America. The New Left was not neutralists;<~~AU: Should this read~~ ~~“neutralist~~,~~” given “was”?~~ ~~Please check original text of quote.~~> the New Left was anti-American.” According to Michael Novak, most of the early neocons rejected their left-wing roots because the ‘’60s radicals demanded, “above all, a loathing for the American system.” Again, the neocons substituted an exaggerated caricature for reality, mistaking hatred of U.S. government policies (especially the war in Vietnam) for hatred of the nation.[42]

The real issue was a profound difference about how nations should treat each other. Neocons ridiculed the counterculture’s vision of a world at peace as yet one more example of dangerous weakness. They stood squarely “against what they regarded as spineless [U.S.] foreign policy,” as Halper and Clarke put it. These scholars add: “Here the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work … with its emphasis on the human capacity for evil, played a key role.” Nearly all scholars of neoconservatism have noted the influence of Niebuhr, the theologian whose writings in the 1930s and 1940s transformed not only American Protestantism but much of American political thought. “Man’s lusts are fed by his imagination,” Niebuhr claimed, so lust is limitless. It grows even stronger when people gather in groups and nations: “The selfishness of human communities must be regarded as an inevitability. … Thus society is in a perpetual state of war.” Private life may be guided by the highest moral principles, Niebuhr argued. But when people act in groups, morality becomes largely irrelevant. Indeed, the Christian tradition that says the devil rules the world “is a very realistic interpretation of the realities of social life.”[43]

According to Dorrien, “neoconservatives reinvoked Niebuhr’s dichotomy between society’s public and private realms, arguing that moral principles appropriate to the private realm had no direct bearing on the public realm. Politics was primarily about the struggle for power by groups generally unrestrained by morality.” Moral restraints are most clearly irrelevant when it’s nation against nation; only the strong nations survive and prosper. In the neocons’ Niebuhrian world, survival requires unconquerable power maintained by any means necessary. “The United States is not going to cease being an imperial power,” Irving Kristol declared flatly. So the U.S. shouldn’t get deflected by overly -sentimental worries about things like human rights, or even torture. (“A focus on torture is a brilliant bit of public relations” by left-wing groups that want to weaken America, he once complained.)[44]

The neocons followed Niebuhr in taking the same approach to domestic politics. As Ehrman notes, their “view of democracy, or what they often referred to as liberal democracy, was essentially that developed by Niebuhr.” In this view, democracy is, like the economic marketplace, is an arena of struggle. Interests groups go on fighting each other forever, and that’s a good thing. It means no one group can ever get too much power—the best safeguard against totalitarianism. Everyone starts out (in theory) with an equal chance, and the strongest win out. In both foreign and domestic affairs, strength is the key to the neocon vision of the good life.[45]

<A>THE NEOCON COLD WARRIORSThe Neocon Cold Warriors

<TX>In the mid-1970s this vision made its way into the government. When Donald Rumsfeld, Ssecretary of Ddefense under President Ford, complained that Americans showed no will to stand up to the enemy, he used typically dire neocon language. Never in decades had Americans been so ready to appease evildoers: “Our nation’s situation is much more dangerous today than it has been at any time since Neville Chamberlain left Munich.” Leo Cherne, who chaired Ford’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, said bluntly: “We are in the midst of a crisis of belief and a crisis of belief can only be resolved by belief. Will depends on something most doomsayers have overlooked—crisis, mortal danger, shock, massive understandable challenge.”[46]

The neocons found the mortal danger and massive challenge they were looking for in the “red menace” of the cold war. They set out to revive America’s anticommunist passion by warning of America’s weakness, a “window of vulnerability” through which the Soviets could make a crippling nuclear attack. Linenthal has shown that they were consciously using militant anticommunism and nuclear fear to restore the bourgeois values that had been challenged in the ‘’60s. Gathered under the banner of the Committee for the Present Danger, the neocons believed “that national recovery would begin with a kind of spiritual discipline: aAn inner transformation, a revival of the will to sacrifice would precede, but be directly related to, the public policy decisions that would spring from a rejuvenated nation. Nuclear weapons played a crucial symbolic role in the restorative process.” Only a nation strong enough to build thousands of nuclear weapons—and to be willing to use them—could call itself truly strong.[47]

The influential writer Podhoretz sounded the loudest alarm. He cast the cold war as an ideological “clash between civilization and barbarism.” But he feared that civilization would lose because Americans, in their “national mood of self-doubt and self-disgust … failure of will … spiritual surrender,” would no longer make the sacrifices needed to “impose their will on other countries.” There was only one remedy. The nation needed to fight the communist monster and destroy it, in order to prove America’s manly strength.[48]

By the mid-1970s, the neoconservatives had a clear political program, focused on ending the era of détente by ramping up cold war fervor. But they did not have the political clout to turn their program into policy. They needed to hitch their wagon to a rising political star; they found him in a one-time movie star, Ronald Reagan. When Reagan became president, the neocons got much of what they wanted. They also formed what Irving Kristol described as “a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government’s attention. And since the Republican party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power.”got a useful alliance with politically active groups of conservative evangelical Christians,~~[49]~~ who were coming to be known as the “religious right.”

Yet under Reagan, the neoconservatives never got all that they wanted. They were cheered by his early talk of fighting and winning a nuclear war. But they were disillusioned when he moved toward disarmament negotiations with the Soviets and eventually spoke openly about eliminating all nuclear weapons. Neocon writers of the mid-1980s attacked Reagan for lacking the strength America needed. For them, strength meant a clear-cut determination to see the U.S. dominate the entire world in every respect.

But what would it mean for the U.S. to “dominate” the world? Writing during the Reagan era, Linenthal found that the neocons offered no clear answer to this question. He noted the often-quoted advice of Colin Gray: “The United States should plan to defeat the Soviet Union and to do so at a cost that would not prohibit U.S. recovery … [iensuring] the emergence of a postwar world order compatible with Western values.” Yet he found that most supporters of the Committee on the Present Danger “believed that absolute evil, far from being destroyed in World War II, persisted, indeed in an even more hideous form [i.e., communism]—but could not now be destroyed without cataclysmic effects to American society. The conflict was present but there seemed no path to an emotionally satisfying ending—the final purification of the world.” In the nuclear age, one could easily dream of following the path of apocalyptic purification to its end. But it was too dangerous to turn the dream into reality.[50]

It was not just the power of the bomb that made neocons hesitate on the path to the apocalypse. Their own beliefs made them hesitate, too. Reinhold Niebuhr’s work convinced them of the “fragmentary and broken character of all historic achievements,” as Ehrman notes. Most neocons harbored serious doubts about achieving any kind of perfection. They were content to win small victories over communism. Indeed, as Ehrman says, they “had become openly distrustful of any attempts to improve the world. Instead, they were happy to settle for just preserving it.”[51]

This was the only logical outcome of the neoconservative story. According to that story, the communists abroad and the antiwar radicals at home shared the same goals: weakening the United States, destroying the experiment of democratic capitalism, and overthrowing the traditional values of Western civilization. They had already used Vietnam as an arena to weaken U.S. power and authority. They would go on exploiting any American weakness to crack the structure of our society, erasing all the boundaries that maintain social order. However, as Niebuhr taught, these enemies of America were ultimately driven by an insatiable lust for power and pleasure, desires rooted in human nature itself. So there was no hope of eliminating their threat completely. The only hope was to keep them forever under control by strenuously protecting political and moral boundaries.

The neocons’ animosity toward communism abroad fused seamlessly with their counterattack on “anti-Americanism” at home because “containment” was the watchword on both fronts. The U.S. had to be constantly on the defensive; the wall of containment had to be as strong as possible; the U.S. had to keep control everywhere. Since there are no institutions to impose fixed rules on the family of nations, the way God’s rules were once imposed on the family home, the world would need a hegemonic power to act as God and lay down the law. On the global scale as on the national, it was all about a benevolent structure of authority powerful enough to keep the playing field stable and orderly, so that everyone could compete freely.

<A>REALITY VERSUS FANTASYReality Versus Fantasy

<TX>The neoconservatives were using cold war ideology to protect themselves against the threats they saw at home and abroad. Yet their fears were largely fantasies. Their story of the 1960s and 1970s would not stand up well under careful scrutiny from historians. The communist threat was exaggerated throughout the cold war. So was the threat from domestic radical movements. The idea that the left is devoid of moral values was a pure neocon invention. As for the charge that the peace movement is “anti-American,” the neocons defined the term so vaguely that the charge cannot be reasonably investigated, much less substantiated. During the ‘’60s era, few peace activists had any links to, or even sympathy for, Soviet communism. Most of them opposed the Vietnam war because they wanted to make America better. They argued (rather convincingly) that anyone who helped end that war was doing their nation a favor.

It is surely not true that all Americans had, or have, maximum personal freedom and an equal place at the starting line of life’s race. Racism and many other factors have obviously kept millions from fulfilling their potential. Government policies have often supported social discrimination. The evidence of greedy business interests, rather than moral ideals, shaping U.S. foreign policy is too abundant to ignore. Even when business tycoons were not calling the shots, policymakers were often more concerned with expanding U.S. geopolitical power than with promoting ideals.

The neoconservatives’ call for national strength would be compelling only if their tale were an objective description of reality, which it clearly was not. However, objective facts were largely beside the point. It was the tale, not objective reality, that created such idealized images of the U.S. and such terrifying images of the monstrous enemy. It was the tale, too, that made the social order seem so vulnerable to destruction. The tale came first, before the threat and the need to counter it with invulnerable might. Neocons insisted on national strength so fervently only because they believed their own story.

Why did they invent it? Why did they come to see so much evil and threat where others did not? A big part of the answer may lie in their own personal experience. Most of the early neocons were the children of immigrants. The U.S. gave them an opportunity for personal advancement beyond anything most of their ancestors had known. For them, this really did seem like the land of the free and the home of the brave. All the liberal talk about economic inequality seemed like overblown exaggeration. Since they knew many people who had ~~have~~ made a fortune, they were sure that anyone could do it. Since almost everyone they saw lived at least comfortably, they assumed that nearly all Americans could have their basic needs met.

So they substituted an idealized fantasy image of America for the real thing. The astute journalist Godfrey Hodgson calls it “a philosophical quasi-religion of Americanism. … The absolutely fundamental neoconservative idea [is] the need to reassert American nationalism or patriotism or ‘Americanism’ or ‘American exceptionalism’: the idea that American society, however flawed, is not only essentially good but somehow morally superior to other societies.” Hodgson defines this “quasi-religion” in the words of a forerunner of the neocon movement, Daniel Bell: “The central image was the idea of individual enterprise … the idea of individual achievement free of class origins; of individual mobility, geographical and social; of equality of opportunity, and the acceptance of the risks of failure.”[52]

Indeed, the children of immigrants never forget the risks of failure. They remember how hard their families had to struggle. They know that success was by no means guaranteed. And they know that “the American way,” as they embrace it, requires them to continue struggling; the risk of failure never ends. So they readily accept Irving Kristol’s initial premise: lLife is an uphill battle, a life-long contest played out in an endless series of smaller contests. Today’s winners can never be certain that they will be strong enough to win tomorrow. The only way to be sure of one’s strength is to have enemies and continually overcome them. No idealized picture of America can erase the resulting anxiety.

The neocons’ virulent critique of U.S. society shows another reason for their anxiety: sSin is still at large. They see conflicts between individual desire and social stability raging all around them. And, as Kristol’s analysis taught them, the very values of modern capitalism that they espouse iensure that those conflicts will continue to rage, since modern capitalism’s route to stability requires an endless stimulation of individualism and consumer desire. So modern society is too complicated to control, or even predict. Everything remains uncertain—except the need to fight against sin forever.

The neocons saw their latent fears of uncertainty made all too real when the ‘’60s transformed liberalism as they knew it. Their whole movement began as an effort to strengthen themselves against changes that seemed (as they openly admitted) beyond their control. Perhaps they turned to foreign affairs as another way to shore up their fragile fantasy of power. Perhaps they projected their own inner struggles around strength and weakness onto the nation as a whole. By identifying themselves so closely with America, they could make every increase in U.S. might a sign of their own growing might. They could rely on military hardware to give them a tangible symbol of strength. Nuclear weapons were especially appealing, because nuclear superiority could so easily become a symbol of absolute, invulnerable might. There is no way to prove this. But how else to explain why such intelligent people would embrace a story that flies in the face of so many facts?

How else to explain, too, the neocons’ insistence that we needed more weapons, because the enemy had grown strong enough to destroy us? There was no empirical evidence to support this view (which turned out to be false). Again, the story created the reality. The story was necessary because the sense of threat was necessary. If there was no one threatening their security, how could they demonstrate strength, which was what made them feel secure and gave meaning to their lives? If there was no enemy to defeat, how could they feel in control of their world, despite all its complexities? How could they know that they were strong enough to cope with the unpredictable vicissitudes of life? And if their opponents were not evil, how could they know for sure that they were on the side of good? Any show of weakness might crack the certainty of their own belief structure, laying bare the web of insecurities embedded in their story.

The neoconservatives’ sense of certainty did begin to crack when the cold war ended. They spent the 1990s repairing the cracks and shoring up their conviction of permanent truth. The result, as the next chapter shows, was an embellished version of their story, which prepared the way for the Bush administration’s story of the war on terrorism. But these new stories of the ‘’90s would only repeat the underlying paradox of the original story: sSeeking security by inventing monsters and then setting out to destroy them, the neocons only rooted themselves ever deeper in their own insecurity.