Learning the Right Lessons from the Neocons

President George Bush holds a press briefing at the White House in September 2007. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

In a recent Campus Progress review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Ethan Porter urges progressives to learn from the triumph of the neoconservative movement. He argues that “neoconservatism’s broad appeal has shown that we believe that, on the whole, America can do good in the world; and it’s better to try to do good and fail than to not try at all.” Porter is on the right track—progressives can and should draw on the success of neoconservatism—but he doesn’t get it exactly right. He draws the wrong lessons from the rise and fall of the neoconservative movement. He expresses unfounded fears about an allegedly impending age of progressive isolationism, buys too much into the conservative idea that the right has laid permanent claim to the concept of patriotism, and argues inaccurately that the neoconservative idea resonated with the average American. All this drowns out his most important point, which is also the reason this is such an important discussion to have—movement building matters, and progressives need to take cues from the neoconservatives in this area if they are ever to gain lasting influence in American foreign policy.

Porter worries that “in the aftermath of the Iraq debacle, the temptation to emulate the isolationists of old…is strong.” But is it? One way to measure the isolationist/interventionist sentiments of progressives is to look at which messages of the presidential candidates have resonated with the public. Here there is deep consensus against isolationism among the presidential candidates. Starting last July, Foreign Affairs invited the major presidential candidates to contribute essays laying out their foreign policy visions. Each of the essays from the candidates urges progressives to embrace a liberal internationalist foreign policy. Porter is wary of excessive isolationism, saying, “We may be tempted to turn inward. That would be a mistake.” He regularly tells supporters that an Obama presidency would mean “America’s back.” So does Bill Clinton. The only progressive candidate whose foreign policy may have tended toward isolationism was Mike Gravel, and we all know how successful his campaign was. The presidential candidate with the strongest isolationist credentials is also arguably the least progressive, most reactionary one. If the progressive base is hungering for some alone-time, it’s not showing up in the presidential race.

Further evidence that progressives do not wish the United States to enter a diplomatic cocoon is their consistent calls for action to end the genocide in Darfur, which has now spread to other parts of Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya. The Save Darfur campaign, led by progressives, has galvanized Americans across the country and has put the issue squarely on the national agenda. The campaign has in fact accomplished many of its goals, albeit not its main one: ending ethnic violence in the region. Many progressives now wrestle with the idea of whether to use American force in trying to resolve the conflict. They may have differing views of this, but they’re clearly not sticking their heads in the sand or arguing against any sort of U.S. involvement.

Porter writes that “as neoconservatism championed America at every chance, the left retreated, ceding the argument.” That’s not quite fair. While it’s certainly true that the American left does not have the purest of pasts (remember, many anti-Vietnam War protesters actually cheered "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/The NLF is gonna win"), contemporary progressives—both politicians and commentators—have consistently couched their rhetoric and policies in patriotic language. Take Russ Feingold or Bill Moyers, for example. Or Paul Waldman of The American Prospect, who notes the contrast between conservatives and progressives on this subject: “This is the difference between thinking that patriotism means talking about how super-awesome America is, and that patriotism means doing things to make America great.” While Porter may not be trying to buy into right-wing talking points by claiming that conservatives have a monopoly on patriotism, his refrain certainly sounds familiar. Additionally, while the image of American flags enveloping the 2004 Democratic Convention may have looked like “an almost pathetic attempt” at patriotism, it is only fair to note that John Kerry proposed an ambitious national service program that year, which would have given half a million young people per year the opportunity to earn money for college by participating in AmeriCorps-like ventures. It’s true that Kerry never made this proposal the be-all, end-all of his campaign, but let’s give credit where it’s due.

Porter is right when he writes that “most Americans believe that their country has a special role to play in the world, and will support politicians who share that belief.” But we didn’t need the neoconservatives to teach us that, and neoconservativsm never had “broad appeal,” as Porter writes. Support for the Iraq war was tied to the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, posed a threat to the United States, and/or was somehow connected to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—it had little to do with the broader neoconservative concern with spreading democracy around the world. In the hysteria that preceded the invasion, the war’s pushers talked almost exclusively about the threat Iraq posed to the United States; their justifications for war were rarely and only tangentially humanitarian or geopolitical. By the summer of 2006, the public had soured on the war, yet prominent neoconservatives were now calling for regime change in Syria and Iran. Neoconservatism, far from being widely popular, was made up of a small group of elites who happened to find a president sympathetic to their worldview at the time, and who saw in 9/11 a perfect opportunities to begin their ambitious, delusional program of reshaping the Middle East.

These critiques of Porter’s piece matter because, taken together, they suggest a significantly different lesson from neoconservatism’s rise and fall: not that progressives need to be more patriotic or present a new foreign policy vision—they’ve already done that—but that movement-building matters, as does timing. The most important thing neoconservatives can teach progressives, it turns out, is that a well-established media and academic infrastructure is just as important—if not more so—than an idea’s inherent validity.

Neoconservatives, Porter notes, created their own establishment in the pages of publications like Commentary, The Public Interest and, later, The Weekly Standard. They disseminated their ideas through think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute. In 1998, the neoconservative Project for the New American Century sent a now-infamous letter to Bill Clinton urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Clinton wouldn’t do it, but Bush, surrounded by some of PNAC’s most influential members, was sympathetic to their cause, particularly after 9/11.

No one who’s been following progressive politics in recent years needs a refresher course on the importance of building infrastructure for the progressive movement, and increasingly that’s happened, though seemingly less so in the arena of national security (two exceptions are the Center for American Progress, of which Campus Progress is a part, and the still quite new National Security Network). But as progressives continue to refine both their beliefs and the vehicles to deliver them, they should remember that neoconservatives had neither public opinion on their side nor a foreign policy vision that spoke to American ideals. What they had was a receptive president, a well-established network of policy outlets, and a one-of-a-kind catastrophe, both of which served their ends perfectly. If progressives want to emulate the success of neoconservativism, but in a less ephemeral manner, they’ll need to deviate from neoconservatism’s delusional, endlessly rosy-eyed vision, but will also need to mimic neoconservatism’s success at promoting itself.

Ben Weyl is a legislative assistant at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. The views expressed here are his own.

Related Stories

• The United States of Business Appeasement
• Commentary: Jobs Plan Good for Students, Young Americans
• With Congress in Gridlock, Obama Should Raise the Debt Ceiling Himself
• Obama’s LGBT Support a Stark Contrast to Past Presidents
• DeSean Jackson’s Anti-Gay Slur Defended by Radio Host