NEO-CON CARNE
Peter Beinart and Mark Schmitt are all wrong. Greg is mostly right. Contemporary liberals who recognized the unwisdom of the Iraq occupation long before, say, The New Republic, are nothing like the original neo-cons.
The central premise of the old neo-cons was the doctrine that indulgence of murderous dictators and unlimited defense expenditures in the name of anti-Sovietism , not to mention harebrained democratization schemes, was no vice. (That neo-con John F. Kennedy thought nation-building in South Vietnam was a good idea.)
Remember, authoritarian totalitarians were susceptible to downfall, but communist dictators were forever? At the height of popularity of this nostrum, as Daniel Moynihan himself pointed out later, unbeknowst to the CIA the Soviet economy was in an advanced stage of collapse. And today the Democratic Republic of Vietnam manufactures shoes for Nike.
In the same vein, there is no indication that today's liberals share the skepticism of the old neo-cons towards government activism in the non-defense, domestic realm. That skepticism, moreover, is overdrawn by PB. It attached mostly to disruptive, politicized community-action efforts that cross-cut with race, not with more conventional social insurance and infrastructure programs. Moynihan supported Social Security to the end and also stood against the 1996 welfare reform. It was agitation in the ghetto that made him nervous.
Liberals of that earlier time (late 70s, 80s) upheld democracy and morality in foreign policy as preferable to the neo-con view, not as routinely practicable at the point of a bayonet. And today's liberals retain a weak spot for internationalism that can slide into unwise military intervention.
When it came to crunch time in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Grenada, Haiti, or any other damn place the USG chose to attack, the neo-cons always intimated that freedom of some improved sort would result. Of course once the smoke clears, nobody ever pays any attention to whether this proves to be the case.
PB's bit about 'tearing down icons' is just silly reductionism -- depicting a strong political tendency with which he is at odds as more narrow and negative than it really is.
The McGovernite democratic left has been pretty consistent through the decades. Internationalist, but wary of the use of force. Hopeful of government activism on behalf of social welfare. By contrast, the centrist/neo-cons past and present jump from Democrat to Republican and back, for the invasion before they are against it, humping The Bell Curve at one turn and lambasting Trent Lott the next.
Sincerety, in politics if you can fake it you've got it made. But it can be hard to fake.
Comments (9)
Heh, indeed. Max hits the nail on the head.
In thinking about today's and yesterday's Vietnam, from the point of view of the Cold Warriors, the worst possible thing happened. The Commies took over. And what were the world consequences of this momentous event? The losers were triumphant 15 years later, and Communism was doomed.
How many other dominoes fell? None. You can't count Cambodia, because THAT disaster was a spillover reaction from Nixon's invasion of that country rather than a conscious "spread of the revolution" by Vietnam. Indeed Communist Vietnam and Communist Cambodia were at war by 1978.
I'd like to hear a neoconservative comment on this. The conservative position would be that "in the fullness of time this too shall pass", as, in Vietnam, it did. But that's never good enough for the neocons when they want to intervene someplace. I genuinely wonder why.
January 10, 2007 5:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you so much. Great post, and comment seem superfluous. I'll only say that the chastening allusion to Kirkpatrick's distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" has another lesson. It was a kind of casuistry, upsetting what Beinart and Mark might call grand schemes, in favor of excuses for propping up "our" guys. The idea that dreams of taking over the world represent ambitious thinking, in the sense of philosophical thinking, should be laid to rest.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
January 10, 2007 5:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just as an aside, I remember reading at the time, that the CIA was reporting that the Soviet military was in an advanced state of decay and that the economy was teetering on the brink. What I remember was the full court press by the neo-cons then, that the only way to contain the Soviet Union was through a built up military and the vaunted missile defense system. Who were these neo-cons? Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Don Kagan, Richard Pipes and Irving Kristol. This is the second time the neo-cons have pushed us down this road, using the exact same tactics - ridicule and marginalize the CIA and stovepipe "intelligence" to suit their political agenda.
January 10, 2007 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would reiterate: where Beinart sees icons being torn, we see Humpty Dumpty broken into small pieces.
January 10, 2007 6:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Sawicky says:
This past semester I had two fine young men from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in one of my courses, and my university is part of a cooperative consortium operating a private university in that country. Who would have thought this in 1974? What a difference 32 years makes. At least some of the "lessons" of Vietnam need to be drawn from the Vietnam of "now", not the Vietnam of "then".
aMike
January 10, 2007 7:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very well said! And you read Beinart so we didn't have to, for which I am doubly grateful.
January 10, 2007 9:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Uh, guys, this is the third or so post parsing Beinart's article. I don't think anyone has added anything really new after the first couple of comments. I know definitions are important in politics but could we move onto something else, say Bush's escalation of his war?
January 11, 2007 6:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bravissimo! Except for a minor quibbles with the penultimate sentence (either "In politics, . . ." or "Sincerity: . . .") and with how you conjoined poor Mark Schmidt with Beinart, I enjoyed every bite of that post. I loved the third paragraph, especially (like other folks apparently), the concluding sentence. "Humping the Bell Curve . . ." Yesss! (In my best Marv Albert)
January 11, 2007 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
The irony of the “who’d uh guessed” sort goes well beyond the commercial examples and into emotional ones for me and I would guess many others.
At the end of 1968 I didn’t like anything about any Vietnamese, not even the looks of their prettiest women. Now I have two grandchildren who are half Vietnamese. They are both beautiful and so is their mother.
January 11, 2007 11:10 AM | Reply | Permalink