Lind:
For years, neoconservatives turned their backs on white working class Americans.
The
possibility that Donald Trump will win the Republican party’s presidential
nomination has inspired leading neoconservatives like Eliot A. Cohen, Robert Kagan and Max Boot to insist that they will never support him. But the
neoconservatives of a generation ago like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz
are themselves partly to blame for the rise of Trump-style national populism in
the United States. By spurning their natural constituency—the mostly-white
working class—the neoconservative leadership deprived a substantial portion of
the American electorate of its own sympathetic, moderating and technocratic
intelligentsia.
As a
result, in the last quarter century many of the blue collar voters who had been
integrated into the FDR-to-LBJ Democrats and then became “Reagan Democrats” in
the 1980s have had no intellectuals or policy wonks of their own, no think
tanks and magazines that respected their values and interests. Organized labor,
which once represented their interests, is nearly extinct outside of the public
sector. The cultural left despises and vilifies working-class white men as
privileged bigots, period. Neoliberal “New Democrats” focus on an audience of
tech billionaires and Wall Street financiers. Conservatives praise the service
of working-class men and women in uniform—but God forbid that the same heroic
veterans should ask for a raise or a higher Social Security benefit or try to
join a union or vote for paid family leave. Lacking any establishment advocates
and sympathetic intellectuals, on left, right or center, many white working
class Americans have therefore turned to demagogic outsiders like Trump. Where else
are they to go?
Why did
the neocons turn their backs on the working class in general, and working-class
whites in particular? Many of the first generation of neoconservative thinkers
came from working-class or lower-middle-class or small-town families. The two
largest working-class groups in the Roosevelt coalition—northern “white
ethnics” including Jewish, Irish- and Italian-Americans, on the one hand, and
non-elite white Southerners and Southwesterners on the other—were
over-represented among early neoconservative intellectuals. There was a
working-class Northeastern Jewish contingent, represented by Irving Kristol and
others, a Southwestern contingent represented by Jeane Kirkpatrick. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan was an Irish-American whose childhood was divided between
Oklahoma and Hell’s Kitchen in New York City.
Most of
the original neoconservatives were
“paleoliberals”—Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson Democrats. Some were moderate
socialists. They rejected both the identity politics and anti-military fervor
of the New Left. At the same time, they rejected the mainstream conservatism of
Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan, which for first-wave neocons was tainted by
opposition to the New Deal and support for segregation in the South. Many early
neoconservatives had close ties which the culturally-conservative and staunchly
anticommunist AFL-CIO.
Within
the Democratic party in the 1970s and 1980s, neoconservatives in groups like
the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the early Democratic Leadership
Council sought to win back working class whites alienated by the increasing
liberalism of the McGovern wing of the Democratic party. For its part, the
early Democratic Leadership Council, dominated by Southerners like Senator Sam
Nunn of Georgia and Midwesterners like Missouri Senator Richard Gephardt,
emphasized a national service proposal that sought to build on the popularity
of the GI Bill among traditional white working class Democrats. The early DLC
was quite different from the later DLC, the Progressive Policy Institute and
the think tank Third Way, which were focused on Wall Street and Silicon Valley,
not middle America.
I
observed all this in the late 1980s and early 1990s, from a vantage-point as a
research assistant to William F. Buckley Jr. and executive editor of the National Interest. At the time, there
were four distinct ideological movements on the right: paleoconservatives,
libertarians, the religious right, neoconservatives and movement conservatives.
With the exception of the religious right, which was focused on a small number
of issues like school prayer, pornography, abortion and gay rights, and had
little to say about economics or foreign policy, each of these movements on the
right represented a more or less coherent worldview combining domestic policy
and foreign policy.
The
paleoconservatives thought that everything had gone downhill with the election
of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, if not with Woodrow Wilson and TR in 1912 or
Lincoln in 1860. They wanted to repeal the New Deal at home in favor of some
kind of decentralized pre-New Deal economic system. In foreign policy their
spokesmen like Pat Buchanan wanted a return to the “America First” isolationism
of Robert A. Taft and Charles Lindbergh. The paleocons had their own
institutions and journals, like the magazine Chronicles.
Like
the paleocons, the libertarians favored a minimalist foreign policy and the
repeal of New Deal and Great Society programs like Social Security and
Medicare. Unlike the paleocons, they opposed government regulation of sex and
drugs, and favored mass immigration, which paleocons tended to oppose on racist
grounds. The libertarians also had their own separate infrastructure: the Cato
Institute, Reason magazine.
The
neocons, as heirs to New Deal liberalism, had no objections to Social Security,
Medicare or federal civil rights enforcement. Many were first- or
second-generation Americans so they tended to be sympathetic to immigrants and
opposed to nativism. Nor did most neocons have objections to organized labor;
many indeed had backgrounds in, or close ties to, the AFL-CIO and the American
Federation of Teachers. Along with working class Democrats in general, for
reasons that cannot be simply dismissed as racist, many neocon intellectuals
worried about means-tested welfare programs undermining family formation and
the work effort. Neoconservative thinkers opposed both paleocon-style white
racial nationalism and New Left multiculturalism, in favor of the centrist
liberal ideal of a common melting-pot nationality, which I defended in my first
book, The Next American Nation
(1995).
Of all
of the movements on the right circa 1990, “fusionism,” also known as “movement
conservatism,” was in the greatest decline. Having launched the political
campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, movement conservative
institutions like Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) had lost much of their
importance. On the intellectual right, National
Review and Modern Age and Human Events had been eclipsed by more
sophisticated neoconservative journals like Commentary
and the Public Interest and the National Interest, while the Heritage
Foundation was taken less seriously than the neoconservative American
Enterprise Institute. The attempted “fusion” by the thinkers around National Review of three incompatible
ideologies—crusading anticommunism, economic libertarianism and social
conservatism—into a single right-wing intellectual synthesis had failed. One
result by the 1980s had been the emergence of separate libertarian and
religious right or “theoconservative” movements outside of the movement
conservative big tent.
At the
time—remember, we are talking about the late 1980s and early 1990s—I expected
all of these movements on the right to wither away, except for the one with
which I identified: neoconservatism, defined as paleoliberalism. Everything
else on the right seemed to me to be headed for extinction. Old Right
paleoconservatism was a cranky sect with a few professors and journalists but
no voters. The libertarian movement was funded well by rich people who wanted
lower taxes and less regulation. But it was clear to me then, as it is still
clear, that the American people did not want to repeal the New Deal and return
to the Roaring Twenties or the Gilded Age. As for the religious right, it was
evident even in the 1980s that its appeal was limited to a portion of the U.S.
population that was in long-term decline, given the social liberalization of
Western society. And National Review’s
fusionist movement conservatism peaked with Reagan’s election in 1980 and by
the time he left office it was running on fumes.
I
therefore expected that in the 1990s and 2000s neoconservatism in its original
paleoliberal version would emerge as one of two dominant ideologies in American
politics. The other would be some version of McGovernism, emphasizing race- and
gender-based identity politics, hostile to the U.S. military as such and
emphasizing post-industrial Green romanticism. In other words, I expected the
two wings of the Democratic party of the 1970s to become the next two-party
system. Everything to the right of neoconservatism would just die out, like the
free silver movement or agrarianism.
In the
long run, I believe I will be proven to have been right. In the short run, I
could not have been more wrong.
Scarcely
had I been promoted to first mate on a ship in the neocon flotilla in the early
1990s than Admirals Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz scuttled their own
perfectly seaworthy fleet and hurried over in lifeboats to join the rotting,
half-sunk, barnacle-infested ship of movement conservatism. Historians can
speculate about their motives for perhaps the most dramatic scuttling since the
sinking of the Graf Spee. Whatever its causes, the liquidation of the
neoconservative movement from within and from above in the 1990s is still
shocking, in retrospect. I can’t think of another case in which a dynamic,
ascendant political-intellectual movement was abruptly betrayed by its own
leaders and subordinated to a much dumber, dying movement. It’s as though Steve
Jobs had liquidated Apple and joined Wang.
In any
event, between Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 and the rise of Trump in
2015-16, the dominant force on the American right has been what I call
Fusionism 2.0. This was even less philosophically coherent than the original
Fusionism 1.0 of the National Review
crowd had been. Fusionism 2.0 was, and is, a strange-bedfellows alliance of
more or less independent movements—the libertarian movement, the religious
right, and second wave neoconservatism, which has specialized almost
exclusively in bellicose and delusional foreign policy.
On
March 3, Jonah Goldberg of National
Review published an op-ed in USA
Today entitled “Trump Redefining ‘So-Called Conservatism.’” Goldberg
concludes his indictment of Trump by writing:
Democrats can’t see it, but
Trump represents a massive victory for the left in so far as he’s the first
major Republican figure to successfully reject libertarianism, even
rhetorically. If Trump is successful, liberty-oriented conservatism will be
replaced by so-called common sense statism.
Now
think about how peculiar that statement is. According to Goldberg, Trump is a
deadly threat to conservatism because he distinguishes between conservatism and
libertarianism. But all schools on the right which are not libertarian by
definition reject libertarianism, in whole or in part. To return to the
1980s—movement conservatives, paleocons, neocons and the religious right all
rejected one or another aspect of libertarianism, as the pure libertarians of
the time, gathered around the townhouse that was then the home of the Cato Institute
on Capitol Hill, never ceased to remind anyone who would listen.
Goldberg
knows this. I don’t remember him, but Goldberg worked for the Public Interest at the time I worked for
the National Interest, in shared
offices. At the time, around 1990, not being a libertarian was not considered a
disqualification for being a conservative. And yet now Goldberg claims that
even “rhetorically” rejecting libertarianism will get you booted from movement
conservatism like the heresiarch of Mar-a-Lago.
But
Goldberg in 2016 is not confused. From his perspective, he is correct. He is
implicitly referring to the rules of post-Reagan Fusionism 2.0—conservatism as
an alliance of single-issue movements, not conservatism as a coherent,
multi-issue worldview or movement. Under the rules of Fusionism 2.0, the
libertarians of the Cato Institute set the “conservative” line on economic
policy, the belligerent neoconservative hawks of AEI set the “conservative”
line on foreign policy, and the religious activists of Focus on the Family and
similar groups set the party line on social issues.
There
are two ways to lose your credentials as a true conservative, according to
arbiters of Fusionist 2.0 orthodoxy like Goldberg. One is to question the
official party line in one of the three areas—say, by criticizing
neoconservative foreign policy, or rejecting libertarian schemes to privatize
Social Security or Medicare, or opposing the outlawing of abortion and gay
marriage. To be a conservative, you have to sign up for the whole Fusionist 2.0
package, no questions asked, no thinking allowed. It’s not enough to want to
privatize Social Security and outlaw gay marriage. You have to want to go to
war with Assad in Syria, as well.
But
there is another way to be purged from the Fusionist 2.0 establishment. A
conservative can be brought up on heresy charges for insisting that one of its
three constituents—the libertarians, the religious right and the neocons—change
from a single-issue movement in a broad alliance into a full-fledged political-ideological
movement with distinctive policy positions on all issues, foreign and domestic.
The
libertarian movement has always been a multi-subject movement like this.
Libertarians reject neoconservative foreign policy for more restrained
alternatives (they don’t like being called isolationists). And they reject
religious-right moralism and favor sexual freedom and the decriminalization of
most or all drugs. So the libertarians get the best of both worlds—they get to
have their own movement, and they also get to write the economic policy for the
Fusionist 2.0 conservative alliance.
In
contrast, the neocons and the theocons are One-Note Johnnies. What is
neoconservative policy toward entitlements? Toward the minimum wage? Toward
trade? Not their department. Neocons are too busy calling for the escalation of
existing wars or the launching of new wars. Domestic policy? Down the hall.
AEI, thought of as a neoconservative think tank, has its own Social Security
expert, Andrew Biggs. Naturally he is a libertarian who worked at Cato from
1999-2003.
Trump
or no Trump, Fusionism 2.0 was bound to collapse. The number of Americans who
really, sincerely, passionately want to privatize Social Security and invade Syria and ban gay marriage is pretty small, if there are any such
individuals at all. The same is true of the conservative intellectuals, most if
not all of whom are really libertarians or foreign policy hawks or religious
conservatives first, and members of the broader conservative movement second.
Conservatism is a coalition of movements, it is not a movement itself.
To
return to the neoconservatives. By abandoning their own full-spectrum movement
in the 1990s, in order to specialize as the resident foreign policy hawks in
the Fusionism 2.0 coalition, they dissolved their own winning team in order to
join a losing team.
Think
about it. Most neocons in the 1980s and 1990s were social liberals or
centrists, not social conservatives. The social conservatives have lost every
battle since then. Roe v. Wade has not been overturned. The Supreme Court has
made gay marriage the law of the land. What have the second-wave
neoconservatives gained, by joining the unpopular losing side on these
issues?
Then
there’s economics. For all their doubts about utopian social engineering, the
first-wave neocons like Pat Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick and Nathan Glazer
and Daniel Bell thought that Social Security and Medicare were triumphs of
American social policy. But the second-wave neocons teamed up with the Social
Security privatizers and the Medicare voucherizers. What did they gain, from
their alliance on domestic policy with the earnest, unworldly followers of
Hayek and Mises and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand? When Jonah Goldberg, champion
of libertarianism and “liberty-oriented conservatism,” is old enough to be
eligible, I predict that Social Security and Medicare will be there for him, in
more or less their present form. All those Social Security privatization plans,
all those articles about abolishing Medicare with a completely different
“market-oriented” system—all for nothing.
And
foreign policy, the one area in which second-wave neocons insisted on the
deference of other members of the establishment conservative coalition, the one
area they reserved for themselves, the one area in which they claimed to be the
experts? The neoconservatives who rejected the restraint of Pat Moynihan and
Jeane Kirkpatrick and followed the triumphalism of Krauthammer, Kristol and
Kagan have contributed to one foreign policy debacle after another: Iraq,
Libya, Syria, and Egypt (many neocons cheered when Mubarak fell and was
replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood).
We
cannot go back to 1990 and take a different historical path. But we can
recognize that Fusionism 2.0 took the American right down a dead end alley at
ninety miles an hour to crash into a brick wall.
I do
not consider myself to be on the right, and I may never do so again. But the
U.S. needs an intelligent right that has reconciled itself to contemporary
social mores, the modern welfare state and a multipolar world. Serious American
conservatives would not waste their energy on deranged crusades to build a
global American empire, repeal the New Deal or promote a return to the sexual
norms of the 1950s. Those are all crazy utopian projects, of the kind that
prudent conservatives are supposed to oppose.
When an
intelligent and moderate American right finally does appear it will look a lot
more like the first-generation neoconservatism of the 1970s and 1980s than like
today’s crumbling establishment right. Among other things, like
first-generation neoconservatism, the next American conservatism might actually
look at the economy from the perspective of the working-class majority of all
races in the United States, not solely from the vantage point of the capitalist
or the corporate manager.
It is
possible to imagine a future American right which would take an approach to the
needs of working class Americans different from those of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and the Cato Institute and the billionaires who fund Republican
politicians. Why not? Gaullists in France, Christian Democrats in Germany, High
Tories in Britain and Japanese conservatives are all “statists” by libertarian
standards. What is “conservative” about immiserating most of your own nation’s
population by abolishing the minimum wage, flooding the labor market with
low-wage immigrants, and lowering the median annual Social Security benefit of
$1,275.28 or roughly $15,000 a year?
Most
Americans are working class people without college educations. If their values
and interests are not represented or taken seriously in any think tanks or any
scholarly journals or any political party factions, they will find someone to
represent them eventually, perhaps a reality TV star. In a crude and demagogic
way, Trump is representing a constituency that the original neoconservatives,
with their modest social backgrounds and ties to organized labor, once
represented in a sober and enlightened way.
Jonah Goldberg cannot imagine a pro-blue-collar American right that is not just donor-class libertarianism camouflaged by flags and Bibles. But I can, because I belonged to such a movement once. It was called neoconservatism.
Jonah Goldberg cannot imagine a pro-blue-collar American right that is not just donor-class libertarianism camouflaged by flags and Bibles. But I can, because I belonged to such a movement once. It was called neoconservatism.
