Can the American Right Renounce Utopianism? By Michael Lind.

Can the American Right Renounce Utopianism? By Michael Lind. The National Interest, March 25, 2016.

Lind:

Can the American right free itself from the utopianism of the post-Reagan era?

The question would have seemed strange to mid-century American conservative thinkers like Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. In their view, conservatism was anti-utopian by definition. In different ways, they identified “conservatism” with a suspicion of radical schemes to revolutionize America and the world.

But today’s orthodox conservatism consists almost entirely of radical utopian schemes to revolutionize America and the world. So-called “movement conservatism” or “fusionism” in its present form is, in fact, an alliance of three distinct utopian movements in economics, domestic policy and foreign policy. All three crusades are doomed to fail in the real world.

Economic Utopianism

Right-wing utopianism in economics takes the form of schemes to repeal almost all of the major social legislation enacted since Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in 83 years ago, back in 1933. Social Security and Medicare will be altered beyond recognition, and replaced by a radically different system of private savings accounts and medical care vouchers, along the lines proposed by the economist Milton Friedman in his book Capitalism and Freedom, published 54 years ago in 1962.

Friedman always insisted that he was not a conservative but a classical liberal or libertarian. Other libertarian economists like Friedrich von Hayek also refused to be described as conservatives.

For their part, mid-century American conservatives rejected libertarianism, on the grounds that free-market utopianism is as undesirable as any other utopianism. Peter Viereck defended the New Deal programs and labor unions as conservative reforms and institutions that had averted more radical socialist or fascist movements in the United States. In his essay, “Libertarians: the Chirping Sectaries,” Russell Kirk wrote:

Conservatives have no intention of compromising with socialists; but even such an alliance, ridiculous though it would be, is more nearly conceivable than the coalition of conservatives and libertarians. The socialists at least declare the existence of some sort of moral order; the libertarians are quite bottomless.

Those words were published in fall 1981. Thirty-five years later in 2016, the distinction between conservatives and libertarians in economic policy has completely collapsed. There is no conservative economic program at all in the United States today. What is called the “conservative” economic program—privatize Social Security, voucherize Medicare, lower or abolish the minimum wage, cut taxes on the rich, and free trade—is merely the radical libertarian economic program, under a different label.

The conservative economic program doesn’t aim to conserve anything. It seeks to blow up almost all existing U.S. economic policies, whether in the realms of social insurance, regulation or taxation, and replace them with far-fetched and mostly untried voucher and privatization schemes dreamed up by libertarian ideologues. The socialist Bernie Sanders at most wants to add a few public programs to the existing American mixture of private, public and nonprofit provision of goods and services. The libertarian right wants to burn American domestic policy to the ground and start over.

Whether pushed by nominal conservatives at AEI and National Review, or by honest libertarian radicals at the Cato Institute and Reason magazine, the libertarian program is utopian. Not that all of its policy proposals are bad—libertarians sometimes have intelligent things to say in particular areas, like transportation or energy. It is the worldview that is crazy.

The premise that humanity is moving rapidly toward a perpetually peaceful, post-national civilization with a rule-governed global market in which there will be unrestricted movement of individuals as well as goods and money across borders is as much a lunatic fantasy today as it was in the 1840s in the era of Cobden and Bright. Human beings are and always will be nonrational, nepotistic social animals, not utility-maximizing economic individualists. And there will be cycles of geopolitical conflict as long as no world empire monopolizes global power.

Russell Kirk was right back in 1981: “genuine libertarians are mad—metaphysically mad.”

Foreign Policy Utopianism

Mainstream conservative foreign policy is just as “metaphysically mad” as the libertarian economic utopianism of the orthodox American right. If the word “conservative” means anything at all, it refers in foreign policy to cautious, anti-utopian Realpolitik, the kind symbolized by statesmen like Disraeli and Bismarck and Eisenhower and Nixon.

But thanks to George W. Bush and the neoconservative advisers who eclipsed Republican realists like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, American “conservatism” came to be identified with the utterly unconservative project of unprovoked wars to topple autocrats in the hope of spreading a global democratic revolution. This radical utopian project, which has backfired and spread chaos exploited by jihadists from Iraq to Syria and Libya, is sometimes called “Wilsonian.” In fact Woodrow Wilson was cautious by comparison with the neocons, as were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Neoconservative democratic revolutionary crusading owes more to the revolutionary mentality of anticommunist socialists in the neoconservative movement and their allies among European social democrats than to the more pragmatic policies of FDR or Eisenhower.

The second inaugural address of George W. Bush in 2005 was breathtaking in its utopian radicalism:

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. . .

. . . Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world:

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free county.”

This was essentially a declaration of war by the United States on all nondemocratic regimes, including those of allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and rivals like China. The American electorate showed what it thought of neoconservative utopianism and disastrous wars of “regime change” by electing a Democratic Congress in 2006 and a Democratic president twice, in 2008 and 2012.

Moral Utopianism

In addition to committing itself to free-market utopianism in economic policy, and the utopian project of promoting universal democracy by the invasion or subversion of other countries, the mainstream right is dedicated, at least rhetorically, to another utopian project: repealing the sexual revolution.

Until Donald Trump recently challenged the rules of conservative campaigning by offering qualified support for Planned Parenthood, American conservative politicians were expected to adopt the views on sexual and gender issues of the most extreme elements of the mostly-Protestant religious right. Mainstream conservatives promise to outlaw abortion and reverse the recent legalization of gay marriage and gay rights. Some social conservatives want to extend the counter-revolution to battle the use of contraceptives.

In the inaugural issue of National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. declared that conservatives wanted to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop,” rather, it must be supposed, as Joshua made the sun stand still in Joshua 10:12-13. The religious right has been more ambitious, wanting to stand athwart history and yell until it goes backward, as the sun went backward in Isaiah 38:7-8 and 2 Kings 20:8-11.

Strictly speaking, the religious right’s agenda has been counter-revolutionary, seeking to restore the sexual norms that prevailed as recently in the 1950s, when abortion was illegal, homosexuals were persecuted as criminals or lobotomized as lunatics, and premarital sex and divorce were scandalous. But a counter-revolutionary movement that has no prospect of success becomes just another kind of utopianism. If the libertarian right and the neocons are “metaphysically mad,” the religious right has been theologically mad.

Politics is the art of the possible. It follows that utopianism is unpolitical, even antipolitical. When combined with violence, utopianism produces horrors like the guillotine, the Nazi death camps, the gulag and the killing fields of Cambodia. When it is insincere, like late communism in the last days of the Soviet Union or in contemporary China, utopianism is far less deadly and revolutionary rhetoric tends merely to serve to divert attention from pervasive, low-level corruption.

The utopianism of the contemporary American right is of the latter kind, and the outsiders rebelling against the insiders in the GOP know it. Few if any elected Republicans or conservative pundits actually believe that there will be a borderless global market or the end of tyranny in the world or a return to the sexual norms of 1950s America in their lifetimes, if ever. These promises of revolution or counter-revolution are by now just stale ritual formulas deployed in elections, like talk about “the revolutionary camp” against “the imperialists” in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. Meanwhile, away from the talking heads on TV and the op-eds and the blogs and the magazines, the actual, mostly-transactional business of conservative politics goes on between lobbyists and legislators and staffers, many of whom will become lobbyists. Millenarian rhetoric is a cover for transactional kleptocracy.

One interpretation of the support for Republican outsiders like Trump and Cruz over establishment candidates like Jeb Bush holds that it is the GOP masses who are the unworldly utopians. This interpretation tends to be popular among progressives. Conservative leaders, it is sometimes suggested, promised conservative voters what they wanted, and the voters are punishing them for failure to deliver utopia on demand.

I don’t buy it, mainly because there is no evidence that in the post-Reagan era there has ever any popular demand for the three utopian projects of libertarian economic policy, neoconservative foreign policy or “theoconservative” moral restoration. The first two were elite projects, at odds with the popularity of Social Security and Medicare among working-class Republican voters—and at odds as well with the unpopularity of neocon wars of regime change and nation-building, in countries which are not immediate threats to the United States. The “moral majority” was always a moral minority, even among white working-class Republicans. The success of Trump in winning the support of many evangelical voters shows that even those voters care about issues other than sex and school prayer.

If anything, the Republican masses are more conservative, in the traditional sense, than the so-called conservative intellectuals. They want the federal government to enforce existing immigration laws and to retaliate against the attempts of state-capitalist mercantilist regimes like China to gain unfair market share in the United States and the world. These policies have costs, but as long as Americans are willing to pay the costs it is quite possible to deter illegal immigration and retaliate against cheating in international trade.

Most illegal economic migration is demand-driven, not supply-driven. Slap a few high-profile employers of illegal immigrant labor with fines or jail sentences, and the flow will dry up with employer demand, even without a sea-to-sea border fence or wall.

Likewise, imposing penalties on foreign mercantilism and/or enacting local content requirements mandating a degree of in-market production in the United States or North America technically is quite easy to do. One can argue that the costs, in the form of higher import prices or foreign counter-retaliation, exceed the benefits, but the policy is hardly utopian. A few trade treaties might have to be torn up, but what is the point of treaties that already have been rendered dead letters by foreign cheating?

My purpose is not to defend Trump voters, much less Trump himself, but to point out the absurdities of establishment conservatism. Many establishment conservatives claim that enforcing immigration laws or protecting American manufacturing are crazy, utopian pipe-dreams. And yet many of these same conservatives are committed, at least in public, to the far more utopian orthodox conservative agenda of a borderless global market and ending tyranny by American force or suasion in every country in the world. These conservatives can be compared to Soviet hacks in the 1970s or 1980s who insist that modest market reforms at home were too difficult even to attempt; best to stick to the party line of the global overthrow of capitalism, comrades!

The American right already has a non-utopian voter base whose voters are evidently uninterested in the revolutionary projects of global free trade and wars for democracy, and far less religious than their parents and grandparents. This means reconciling Republican voters with Republican policies is simply a matter of changing the policies to what the voters want.

It’s simple, really. The conservative movement merely needs to jettison its three utopian projects of libertarian economics, global democratic revolution and the reversal of the sexual revolution. Once this operation takes place, plenty of differences will remain to distinguish the American right from the American left and center, even if conservatives end their war on Social Security and switch from foreign nation-building to nation-building at home.

To be sure, a post-utopian American Right might disappoint and drive away some conservative thinkers and activists who actually believe in one or more of the three utopian crusades. But if I am correct, and most movement conservative operatives are really just paying lip service to these policies, I would expect them to adapt quickly to a new, post-utopian American conservative movement. All they need to do is drop the pretense of believing in utopian fantasies that hardly anyone believes in anyway.

Farewell, Grand Old Party. By Joel Kotkin.

Farewell, Grand Old Party. By Joel Kotkin. Orange County Register, March 22, 2016.

Kotkin:

The increased likelihood of Donald Trump as the GOP presidential nominee, as evidenced by his win in Florida and other states last week, spells the end of the Republican Party as we have known it. Successful political parties unite interests under a broadly shared policy agenda. The Clinton Democrats may seem ethically challenged, condescending and bordering on dictatorial, but they share basic positions on many core issues and a unifying belief in federal power as the favored instrument for change.

In contrast, the Republican Party consists of interest groups that so broadly dislike each other that they share little common ground.

GOP libertarians want more social freedoms; social conservatives want less. Neocons hunger for war, while most other Republicans, both libertarian and constitutionalist conservatives, reject Bushian interventionism. The rising populist wave now inundating the party and driving the Trump juggernaut both detests, and is detested by, the party’s media, corporate and intellectual establishment.

Some “movement” conservatives are returning the favor, essentially blaming the white working class for their own failures. Among some on the right, it appears, capitalism and the law of the jungle are always noble, and those who fail to make the grade clearly are not. No surprise, then, that the new generation of voters seems more ready for socialism than for laissez faire.

Against weak and squabbling opposition, Trump has employed his crude persona, and equally crude politics, to dominate the primaries to date. But in the process he has broken not only the party structure, but also its spirit. Indeed, some of the party’s most promising emerging leaders, such as Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, have made it clear they cannot support a candidate who seems to have little respect for the Constitution, or any other cherished principle.

In contrast, the Democrats, for all their manifest divisions, remain united by a desire to reward and parcel out goodies to their various constituencies. Hillary Clinton, as the troublesome Bernie Sanders fades, will gather a Mafia-like commission of Democratic “families” – feminists, greens, urban land speculators, public unions, gays, tech oligarchs and Wall Street moguls. Given the self-interest that binds them, few Democrats will reject her, despite her huge ethical lapses and appearance of congenital lying.

Finding fault

Who’s to blame for the destruction of the GOP? Some may argue the Tea Party faction and evangelicals behind Ted Cruz siphoned off too many conservative voters, who might have backed a more acceptable candidate. But many social conservatives have flocked to Trump, blunting the Bible-thumping brand that drove the Texan’s strategy.

The other icon of the Right, the Tea Party, also appears increasingly in decline. One Gallup poll shows the Tea Party with less than 20 percent support among voters. Simply put, these forces are too weak, and disunited, to defeat Trump.

Those most responsible for the party’s decline, however, are those with the most to lose: the Wall Street-corporate wing of the party. These affluent Republicans placed their bets initially on Jeb Bush, clear proof of their cluelessness about the grass roots – or much else about contemporary politics. They used to attract working- and middle-class voters by appealing somewhat cynically to patriotism and conservative social mores, which also did not threaten their property and place in the economic hierarchy. Now these voters no longer accept “trickle down” economics or the espousal of free trade and open borders widely embraced by the establishments of both parties.

The fecklessness of the party leadership has been evident in the positions taken by corporate Republicans. Reduce capital-gains taxes to zero? Are you kidding, Marco? New trade pacts may thrill those at the country club, but not in towns where industries have fled to Mexico or China.

And then there’s immigration. Simply put, most Americans – upward of three-fifths, according to one recent poll – consider immigration a “threat to the country.” The idea of expanding H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers, as suggested by mainstream GOP leaders, is a classic case of stupidity: supporting an electorally toxic position that really only benefits people – notably tech oligarchs – who also largely bankroll the other party.

Increasingly, the grandees are clueless how to appeal to a party rank-and-file that is no longer theirs. Far from being a country club party, roughly 53 percent of Republicans, according to Pew, come from households with incomes under $75,000. These are precisely the people who feel corporate America and the party economic gospel no longer work to their benefit.

These voters will be key to Trump’s strategy in November. He hopes many middle- and working-class Democrats will defect to his cause. Upward of 20 percent of Democrats, according to some surveys, are ready to bolt to embrace The Donald.

This could prove critical in many states, particularly in the upper Midwest. A study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh during December and January. It found strong support for Trump, even among self-identified Democrats.

Although some respondents might be motivated by racial concerns, they were most impressed with Trump’s “attitude,” the blunt and forthright way he talks. Among issues, “immigration” placed third, far behind the No. 1 concern: “good jobs / the economy.”

Rather than a Republican revival, Trump’s candidacy represents an anti-party insurgency. Nate Silver suggests that Trump’s candidacy has more in common with that of Ross Perot in 1992 than that of a typical mainstream Republican. Perot also ran a somewhat nationalistic campaign openly hostile to the parties’ dominant establishments.

In November, there may not be enough white middle- and working-class votes to put Trump over the top, but the GOP “mercenaries” don’t appear capable of stopping his hostile takeover of their party. In fact, the attacks by Mitt Romney and others have handed Trump exactly what he thrives on – a photo op to stand up to powerful “losers,” “idiots” and “morons.”

After the disaster

The election of Trump would elevate an unscrupulous, amoral and patently ignorant bully to the White House. This result seems unlikely as the corporate GOP either opts out of the election, or even rallies to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s campaign may bring some more independents and Democrats to the Republican cause, but he has alienated too many people – women, Hispanics, educated voters – to win a 50-state election.

Trump’s defeat will leave the Republican Party in shambles. Even party Chairman Reince Priebus admits another presidential defeat could undermine the party’s viability. “We don’t exist as a national party if we don’t win in 2016,” Priebus suggests. “You can’t compete 16 years out of the White House, it’s just not possible.”

Of course, the GOP in 2017 still will control the House of Representatives and more statehouses than its rivals. But it may lose the Senate in November, leaving Clinton a clear path to dominate the Supreme Court. This will strip away the only barrier to ever more intrusive rule by decree. Clinton has already made it clear that, unlike her husband, she is ready to circumvent Congress if it dares decline her initiatives.

In this way, the rest of the country will increasingly resemble what we already have in California – a central governing bureaucracy that feels little constrained about expanding its power over every local planning and zoning decision. The federal republic will become increasingly nationalized, dispensing largely with the constitutional division of power.

Centralism, as known well in California, comes naturally to a one-party state. Businesses, particularly large ones, faced with uncontested political power, will fall in line. How many times have I heard California business people, even supposedly powerful ones, tell me they are frustrated with Gov. Jerry Brown’s increasingly draconian rule but sheepishly add that they are too afraid to say anything.

Looking ahead, the only hope lies in a mounting reaction, perhaps manifesting in a new party, to over-reach. As Clinton works to serve her “families,” like public employees, crony capitalists and the academia/media PC police, she could ignite a rebellion not only among the Trump constituency but also many more moderate, suburban voters who find Trump too crude, divisive and unpredictable.

This new movement should be built around the idea that, in the information age, power can, and should, devolve to localities as much as possible. Even Californians prefer local, as opposed to centralized, control. This could spark a widespread populist rebellion which, in 2020, could finally tame the federal Leviathan and allow American politics to return to something the founders may have envisioned.

Why It’s Time For a Trump Revolution. By Michael Goodwin.

Why it’s time for a Trump Revolution. By Michael Goodwin. New York Post, March 19, 2016.

Goodwin:

My friends are worried about me. They insist something is not right and suggest prayer, counseling, even rehab. “Take a break,” they urge. “Get away for a few days and clear your head.”

They are wise and kind, and it would be foolish to dismiss their concerns. Truth be told, there are moments when I doubt myself. Am I making a huge mistake? Am I losing my mind?

Perhaps I am. My friends say that’s the only possible explanation for the fact that I might support Donald Trump for president.

The insanity defense is all that’s left now that the smart set has declared that it’s immoral and indecent to even think about voting for Trump. OK, call me immoral and indecent as well as crazy, because I’m thinking about it.

It’s been a long road to get here. When Trump’s name first popped up, I joked about moving to Canada. When he launched his campaign, I cursed him, certain he was going to create a circus just when Republicans finally had a strong field of candidates.

I was intrigued by many of them, starting with Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. Others I admired while believing they wouldn’t get far — Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Carly Fiorina.

I like those Republicans even though I’m a registered Democrat, just not that kind of Democrat. I voted for President Obama in 2008, believing he meant it when he said no red states, no blue states, only the United States. The barrier he broke added to his appeal.

Six months later, I was off the bus. It was already clear Obama had no intention of building a consensus on anything, although few realized he would be such a radical and partisan polarizer. He may love America, but doesn’t seem to like actual Americans. Other than himself, of course.

With the world on fire thanks to his abdication of global leadership, and with the home front nervous and angry, the 2016 race couldn’t come soon enough. I hoped a Democrat would emerge who realized that Obama had set us on a course that was dangerous and unsustainable, with our ­national debt exceeding $18 trillion.

Clearly, neither Bernie Sanders nor Hillary Clinton is that Dem, though I’ll vote for Sanders in the New York primary just to send her a message.

Following Obama, Clinton’s election would be a calamity. She would be beholden to him, and unable to shift much from his disastrous policies. And who knows what she really believes?

Besides, if the Clintons are rewarded with the White House again, it would be impossible to demand honesty from any public official in America. She’s thoroughly corrupt and, in the memorable words of the late William Safire, a “congenital liar.” Voting for her is a give-up on the future.

So I’m stuck with Republicans, but my favorites were rejected, with only Kasich surviving by a thread. Frankly, I don’t blame voters. They’ve had it with vanilla men who play nice and quietly lose elections. If the nominee is another Mitt Romney, Clinton would win in a landslide.

As noted, I do admire Cruz, but he strikes me as more Barry Goldwater than Ronald Reagan. He’s whip smart, but too rigid ideologically and personally joyless. If I were president, I would nominate him for the Supreme Court in hopes he could fill Antonin Scalia’s shoes as the leading constitutionalist.

Which leaves only Donald J. Trump. He’s weird, erratic and I have no idea what he will say or do next. His nasty put-downs of rivals and journalists, especially Megyn Kelly, diminish him. His policies are as detailed as bumper stickers and his lack of knowledge about complex issues scares me.

If he weren’t the GOP front-runner, the gaps in his game would make it easy to dismiss him. But dismissing him requires dismissing the concerns of the 7.5 million people who have voted for him. That I can’t do.

My gut tells me much of the contempt for Trump reflects contempt for his working-class white support. It is one prejudice gentry liberals and gentry conservatives share.

It is perhaps the last acceptable bigotry, and you can see it expressed on any primetime TV program. The insults don’t all seem good-natured to me. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, surrounded by the kind of people supporting Trump, and I sympathize with their worsening plight.

For generations, they went all in for the American dream. Their families fought the wars, worked in the factories, taught school, coached Little League and built a middle-class culture. Now they are abandoned and know it.

Nobody speaks for them. The left speaks for the unions, the poor and the nonwhite, even shedding tears for illegal immigrants and rioters and looters. The GOP speaks for the Chamber of Commerce, big business and Wall Street.

Trump alone is bringing many of these forgotten Americans into the political system, much as Obama did with millennials and black voters. Trump has done it with full-frontal attacks on lopsided trade deals and a broken immigration system. His message is a potent brew of populism and nationalism that reaches across the partisan divide, and the public response is stirring the country.

In fact, many who despise Trump concede he is right that globalization and the open-border flood of cheap labor, while benefitting many Americans, has hurt many others. But instead of working to fix a broken status quo, many on the left and right echo each other’s venomous attacks against him. One day he is Mussolini, the next he’s Hitler, and he’s routinely accused of hate speech and racism.

What is his great sin? Breaking the taboo about what ails the middle class? Daring to challenge a power system that only pretends to have the consent of the governed?

The shame is that others didn’t beat him to it.

For his chutzpah, tens of millions of dollars are being poured into attack ads against Trump, and the urgent blue-nosed concerns about dark pools of money in politics have vanished. As long as he’s the target, all is fair.

Often, the avalanche of sludge against Trump looks and sounds like a reactionary confederacy fighting to keep its power and privileges. Naturally, the mainstream ­media is slashing away.

A Washington Post editorial claims that stopping Trump is the only way to “defend our democracy.” In other words, those troublesome voters are the problem.

A New York Times columnist raised the prospect of assassination. Sure, it was a joke. Make that joke about Obama or Clinton and see who laughs.

I would be delighted to support a more conventional candidate who has Trump’s courage and appeal, but we don’t always get to pick our revolutionaries. And make no mistake, Donald Trump is leading a political revolution that is long overdue.

The Neocons Are Responsible for Trumpism. By Michael Lind.

The Neocons Are Responsible for Trumpism. By Michael Lind. The National Interest, March 7, 2016.

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.

CPAC 2016: Mark Levin.

CPAC 2016: Mark Levin. Video. The ACU, March 4, 2016. YouTube.

Dennis Prager on the American Trinity at CPAC 2016.

Dennis Prager on the American Trinity at CPAC 2016. Video. The ACU, March 3, 2016. YouTube.

Judge Jeanine Pirro: Mitt Romney Awoke a Sleeping Giant.

Judge Jeanine: Mitt Romney awoke a sleeping giant. By Jeanine Pirro. Video. Justice w/ Judge Jeanine. Fox News, March 6, 2016. YouTube.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Making Donald Drumpf Again.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Donald Trump. Video. LastWeek Tonight, February 28, 2016. YouTube.

The Genius Secret Trump Knows About U.S. Politics. By Robert W. Merry.

The Genius Secret Trump Knows About U.S. Politics. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, March 2, 2016.

Merry:

Israel’s Options in a Chaotic Middle East. By Yossi Klein Halevi.

Israel’s Options in a Chaotic Middle East. By Yossi Klein Halevi. Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2016.

Halevi:

Faced with a new Palestinian uprising, Israelis have shelved the idea of a two-state solution—and have found surprising new allies in a disintegrating Middle East.

One recent morning, a Palestinian teenager stabbed a security guard at the light rail station minutes from my home in Jerusalem. About an hour later, I drove past the station and was astonished to see—nothing. No increased police presence, not even police barricades. The guard had managed to shoot his attacker, and ambulances had taken both away. Commuters were waiting for the next train. As if nothing unusual had happened.

The ability to instantly resume the pretense of normalcy is one of the ways that Israelis are coping with the latest wave of Palestinian terrorism. For the last six months, Palestinians—some as young as 13—have attacked Jews with knives and hatchets and even scissors, or else driven their cars into Israeli crowds, killing over two dozen people. (About 90 Palestinians have been killed carrying out the attacks.) The violence was provoked by the unsubstantiated Palestinian claim—strongly denied by the government—that Israel intended to permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

The almost daily attacks tend to blur together, though several have become emblematic—like the stabbing murder of a mother of six in her home while her teenage daughter ran to protect her siblings. Still, by Israeli standards, the violence so far has been manageable. Israelis recall that in the early 2000s, when suicide bombers were targeting buses and cafes, almost as many victims would die in a single attack as have been murdered in the current wave of terror.

Israelis have been here before. In 1992, a monthslong stabbing spree by Palestinian terrorists in Israel’s streets helped to catalyze one of the great upsets in Israeli politics, the election of Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, ending over a decade of rule by the right-wing Likud Party. The stabbings were the culmination of a four-year Palestinian revolt against Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This first intifada (“uprising” in Arabic), as it came to be known, forced the Israeli public to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism. It also convinced many Israelis that the Likud’s policy of incremental annexation of the West Bank and Gaza was simply not worth the price.

Until the first intifada, Israelis had tended to regard control of the territories won by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War as benign, bringing prosperity to the occupied as well as to the occupiers. As the intifada took hold, Israeli anger turned not only against the Palestinians but against the ruling Likud. There were antigovernment riots, and Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was widely ridiculed for his passivity and lack of vision.

Today, too, there is widespread disaffection with a Likud government’s response to stabbings. Some 70% of Israelis say that the government has been ineffectual, and nearly as many say they feel personally unsafe. Yet, unlike 1992, there are no antigovernment demonstrations, and few calls for a resumption of the moribund peace process.

Indeed, a private poll recently commissioned by one of the parties in the coalition government reveals that only 4% of Israelis consider the peace process their highest priority—the lowest percentage for any major issue. Improbably, the Likud remains the most popular party. And what little support the Likud is losing isn’t to the left but further to its right, to parties advocating a tougher response to terror and the annexation of large parts of the West Bank.

One reason for the radically different responses in 1992 and 2016 is that Israelis are living in a very different Middle East. The Middle East of the early 1990s seemed a place of promise: An American-led coalition, including Arab states, had defeated Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, while the Soviet Union, sponsor of Arab radical regimes and the Palestinian cause, had vanished. Palestinian leaders seemed ready to negotiate an agreement with Israel, and a majority of Israelis, especially after the first intifada, were ready to try.

In today’s disintegrating Middle East, by contrast, Israelis question the viability of a Palestinian state. Which Arab state, Israelis ask, will be a likely model for Palestine: Syria? Iraq? Libya?

Few Israelis believe that a Palestinian state would be a peaceful neighbor. In part that’s because the Palestinian national movement—in both its supposedly moderate nationalist wing and its radical Islamist branch—continues to deny the very legitimacy of Israel. The Palestinian media repeat an almost daily message: The Jews are not a real people, they have no roots in this land and their entire history is a lie, from biblical Israel to the Holocaust. The current wave of stabbings has been lauded not only by the Islamist Hamas but by the Palestinian Authority. “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem,” said Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas in September. “Every martyr will reach paradise.”

The result is profound disillusionment with the peace process across the Israeli political spectrum. Writing recently in the left-wing newspaper Haaretz, the political scientist Shlomo Avineri, long one of Israel’s leading voices against the occupation, lamented that the Palestinian national movement regards Israel “as an illegitimate entity, sooner or later doomed to disappear.” Labor Party leader Yitzhak Herzog, in a dramatic reversal of his rhetoric in last year’s election, recently conceded that there was no chance anytime soon for a deal with the Palestinians.

Most Israelis still support, at least in principle, a two-state solution. Many understand that the creation of a Palestinian state is an existential necessity for Israel, extricating it from a growing pariah status in the world at large, from the wrenching moral dilemmas of occupying another people, from a demographic threat that endangers Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state. And they understand that the continuing expansion of settlements on the West Bank will only complicate Israel’s ability to withdraw eventually.

But a majority also regards a Palestinian state as an existential threat. They know that it would place Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport, the country’s main link with the world, in easy range of rocket attacks. A Palestinian state also could result in a Hamas takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israelis sense that they have exhausted their political options toward the Palestinians. In the 1970s and ’80s, there was widespread enthusiasm for the expansion of Israeli settlements in the territories. Sooner or later, many Israelis believed, the Palestinians and the Arab world would accept this “Greater Israel”—a Jewish state including the West Bank and Gaza. But that dream was shattered in the first intifada of the late 1980s.

In its place, Rabin offered an alternative dream, promising (in a slogan of those days) “to take Gaza out of Tel Aviv and Tel Aviv out of Gaza.” In 1993 he launched the Oslo peace process, shaking hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. But the dream of a negotiated solution also shattered, with the wave of suicide bombings that began in 2000 and became known as the second intifada. The violence followed Israeli offers to withdraw from most of the territories and to uproot dozens of settlements. Almost overnight, a once-vigorous Israeli left, which had assured the public that Israeli acceptance of a two-state solution would be reciprocated by Palestinian moderation, all but collapsed.

Finally, Israel tried a desperate third approach: unilateral withdrawal, dismantling Israel’s settlements and army bases from Gaza in 2005. Many Israelis saw that move as a test case for a future unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank. Ehud Olmert was elected prime minister in 2006 on the promise that he would do precisely that if there was no credible Palestinian partner.

But in the years following the withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas, which seized power there in 2007, fired thousands of rockets at Israeli communities along the southern border, all but destroying normal life there. Israel has since fought two wars in Gaza, trying to stop those attacks. The turmoil—and the vehement criticism around the world of Israel’s military actions, which Israelis overwhelmingly saw as self-defense—has convinced many unilateralists that repeating the process in the West Bank is simply too risky.

Today, Israelis have essentially embraced the status quo as the least terrifying option. The problem with the status quo, however, is that it isn’t static. The current terror campaign has, for the first time, included relatively large numbers of Palestinians from East Jerusalem who, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank, are able to freely travel in Israel. And radicalization is spreading even among Israel’s Arab citizens, a handful of whom have participated in terror attacks.

At the same time, settlement-building in the West Bank continues—though at a slower pace than in the past, according to the Peace Now Settlement Watch, an anti-occupation NGO. This did not deter the European Union from its recent decision to make a distinction in labeling between products made in settlements and those made in what it considers Israel proper—a move endorsed by the Obama administration.

Israel finds itself in perhaps the most frightening time since the weeks before the Six-Day War, when Arab armies massed on its borders and Arab leaders threatened to destroy the Jewish state. Terror enclaves now exist on most of Israel’s borders—Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Islamic State on the Golan Heights and in Sinai, Hamas in Gaza. Tens of thousands of missiles are aimed at Israeli cities and are capable of reaching any point in Israel. Iran is emerging as the region’s dominant power, even as it remains on the nuclear threshold. And a growing international movement to boycott the Jewish state has deepened Israelis’ sense of siege.

And yet—precisely because of the Iranian threat against the Sunni world and of regional instability generally—the Arab world is opening up to Israel in unprecedented ways. Even with the Palestinian issue festering, Saudi Arabia has all but acknowledged a security dialogue with Israel, and Israeli officials are now being interviewed in Saudi media, which not long ago referred to Israel as the “Zionist entity,” refusing even to name the Jewish state.

Security cooperation between Israel and Egypt, focusing on containing Hamas, hasn’t been so warm since the Egyptian-Israeli peace process in the late 1970s. Ironically, as the movement to boycott Israel spreads in Europe and on American campuses, Israel is gaining growing acceptance in the Arab world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently called on Arab leaders to publicly acknowledge that they now regard Israel not as a threat but as a strategic partner.

Beyond the Arab world, an increasingly embattled Turkey is negotiating a rapprochement with the Jewish state. Turkey’s rival, Greece, once among the most vociferous pro-Palestinian voices in the European Union, has become one of Israel’s leading European allies, deepening military and economic ties and opposing the EU’s decision to mark West Bank settlement products—and this under a left-wing government.

In this bewildering new world, Israelis sense not just unprecedented threats but also opportunity. Mr. Netanyahu has suggested the possibility of a regional agreement between Israel and Arab countries that would bypass a dysfunctional Palestinian leadership and create some form of Palestinian state, with security arrangements negotiated between Israel and Arab leaders. But that’s a scenario for an uncertain future at best.

In the absence of any peace process, there are steps Israel needs to take. A settlement freeze would send a much-needed signal that Israel’s long-term interests in the territories are confined to security needs, not to implementing historic claims. The government is debating granting work permits within Israel for tens of thousands of Palestinians, to ease an increasingly hard-pressed West Bank economy. Mr. Avineri, writing in Haaretz, called for replacing the Israeli blockade on Gaza, intended to prevent Iranian weaponry from reaching Hamas, with border controls supervised by Egypt and the EU. With Hamas trying to dig tunnels under the Israeli border and threatening to attack Israeli communities, that isn’t likely to happen soon. Still, Mr. Avineri concluded, Israel needs to begin a long-term process of ending the occupation and saving itself as a Jewish and democratic state.

Meanwhile, Israelis are debating how to balance moral and democratic norms with fighting terrorism. So far the government has resisted demands from the far right to adopt draconian measures, like expelling the families of terrorists to Gaza. When the army chief of staff, Gadi Eizenkot, recently told high-school students that he opposes trigger-happy responses to terrorism, he was attacked by some on the right. But he was publicly backed by the hard-line Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who said, “We need to know how to win and still remain human.”

Boycotted and courted, threatened by genocidally-minded enemies and by a corrosive occupation, and facing the possibility of war at any time on any border, Israelis deal with reality one day at a time. A recent song by the local rock band, Blue Pill, summed up the Israeli way of coping: “We’ve taken some blows / taken a deep breath and moved on.”

Mr. Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is the author of “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation.” He is writing a book about the future of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.