Perhaps the absolutely fundamental neoconservative idea was 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. [This idea] is especially associated with immigration. The future neoconservatives mostly came
from relatively recent immigrant stock. It is arguable, though certainly unproven, that such people
in America feel a stronger need than those of longer American lineage to display their credentials
as Americans; or rather, that those whose families came over on the Mayflower feel that there is
nothing incompatible between deep patriotism and a propensity to shout about what needs to be
changed.
-The World Turned Right Side Up : A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America
(1996) (Godfrey Hodgson) Boy, Godfrey Hodgson really hits the nail on the head there. Norman Podhoretz's book, My Love
Affair With America, is basically a protracted attempt to suggest that he loves America more than any
of his former rivals on the Left, or current rivals on the Right. Podhoretz famously broke ranks with
the intellectual New York set in the 1970's, having determined that their anti-Americanism, most
ostentatiously displayed during the Vietnam War, neither jibed with his own life experiences--the
meteoric rise of a poor Jewish child of immigrants to respected writer status--nor was compatible with
the need to maintain a militarily strong and assertive America, to stand as a final guarantor of an
embattled Israel's continued existence. He has an easy time rewinning his old battle with the radical
counterculture (though he's unable to resist the compulsion to claim credit for having created that
counterculture in the first place). Their anti-Americanism is a result of their genuine opposition to
freedom, which is America's organizing principle. They do not wish to perfect America, but to
destroy it and remake it in an image of their utopian (or dystopian) fantasies. Podhoretz gives them
yet another well-deserved drubbing. But then he takes on the modern Right, and here he founders badly : In the mid-1990s there unexpectedly came an outburst of anti-Americanism even among some of
the very conservatives I thought had been permanently immunized against it...I was already pushing
seventy, and it made me a little tired to think of going back into combat over a phenomenon that I
had fondly imagined I would never have to deal with again, and certainly not on the Right The anti-Americanism he's talking about is the harsh, but loving, cultural criticism of Bill Bennett and
Robert Bork, and the tentative suggestions on the Religious Right that the Supreme Court may have so
far departed from the Constitution in its decisions on social issues, specifically abortion and
Church/State issues, that it is no longer a legitimate institution. Podhoretz is horrified by these trends
and seeks to read them out of the Conservative movement, but they were there long before him and
will remain long after. The problem for Podhoretz, and for neoconservatism in general, is the absence of a core political
philosophy. The Left believes that the central duty of government is to guarantee equality of
outcomes among the citizenry and that government is capable of solving social problems and
effectively running the economy. Classic Conservatism is structured around a countervailing belief in
freedom, which necessitates a very limited government, but strong social institutions, and, though it
requires equality of opportunity, accepts that the resulting outcomes will be very different.
Neoconservatism is really only interested in supporting Israel and opposing quotas, it's largely agnostic
on the other issues and has no firm view of the proper role of government generally. On social issues,
a natural distrust of Christian conservatism and the fact that neoconservatism arose in the urban milieu,
combine to create a willingness to countenance big government, and the need for a massive military
requires big government. On the other hand, if equality is enforced by the state, it will work to the
detriment of groups, like Jews, who are disproportionately successful, so there's a reluctance to trust
government too far. This naked self-interest is certainly legitimate, but it's hardly a coherent political
philosophy. That Podhoretz is only marginally conservative becomes clear from the fact that he almost completely
ignores the question of the size and role of government, from his dismissal of objections to the 1964
Civil Rights Act, from his failure to discuss, except in passing, the free market economic philosophy
of folks like Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek, and from his failure to comprehend why abortion is
such a salient issue on the Right. Even more revealing is his thinly disguised contempt for the
conservative intellectuals of the first half of the century, who either go unmentioned (Albert Jay Nock,
for example) or are dismissed as cranks (like the Agrarians--Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, etc.).
He seems to think that conservatism was born in the 1950s, only became a significant political
movement in the post Vietnam era (not coincidentally, just after he joined it) and consists of little
more than nationalism. Were that true, were conservatism nothing more than a blind patriotism, of recent vintage, then he
would be right to criticize cultural conservatives for questioning the moral climate of the country and
the direction in which it is heading. But conservatism, even American conservatism, antedates
America. And conservatism has endured precisely because it offers such a powerful critique of
America. In Albert Jay Nock's great book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he says the following : Burke touches [the] matter of patriotism with a searching phrase. 'For us to love our country,' he
said, 'our country ought to be lovely.' I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on
which Western civilization will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which is rich,
prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It
can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the
irresistible attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the
society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly
consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer. By economism, Nock means a kind of unfettered materialism or consumerism. These lines, prophetic
anyway, seem even more prescient in light of the events of September 11th. There is a palpable sense
in America's continuing discussion of the events that the America that died on September 11th
deserved to die (though the victims certainly did not), that it was too self-centered, too trivial, too
degenerate. People have now judged the America of the 1990s, which Podhoretz is here defending
against conservative critics, and, as W. H. Auden said of an earlier time, they have determined it to be
"a low dishonest decade." In the final pages of the book Podhoretz offers a dayyenu, a list of each of the things that would have
been sufficient for us to owe America a debt of gratitude. After a brief, and platitudinous, generic list,
including such things as "domestic tranquillity" (which one is tempted to point out that China too
enjoys), he gets to his real reasons for feeling patriotic, and they are all about the success he's made of
himself : "...America...sent me to a great university..."; "...America handed me a magazine of my own
to run..."; "...America saw to it that I would live in an apartment in Manhattan..."; "...America
arranged for me to build a country house...". It's utterly vacuous and truly appalling. Freedom is vital to everything that America stands for. It makes possible the kind of rags to riches
story that Podhoretz has lived. But it is not enough. Conservatives demand freedom, but also believe
that our country "ought to be lovely." This loveliness consists mostly of an adherence to the eternal
values of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of which, as Nock says, we are unworthy inheritors. And right
there is another key element, humility. Conservatives realize that our inheritance is too precious to
experiment with willy-nilly and so seek to conserve as much as can possibly be conserved of that
tradition. Paraphrasing Nock (one last time, I promise), who borrowed a phrase from Lord Falkland : What it is not necessary to |
