Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

As someone who has lingering sympathy for the first generation of domestic policy neoconservatives like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the gang at the Public Interest, I’m not too thrilled that neo-con is basically used as an all-purpose epithet.  Mostly because when people just throw out the term neo-con, it can obscure true ideological and political differences between those who supported the Iraq War.  For instance, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are old school imperialist hawks, not neoconservatives.

But the term is useful, and should be used as an epithet, for describing a particular vision of foreign policy that has undoubtedly been disastrous.  Considering that for every foreign policy neoconservative, the invasion of Iraq was the central objective, it makes sense that term has turned into a derisive epithet.  Considering neoconservatives during the run-up to Iraq defined themselves as the most pure supporters of the Iraq war, and called their opponents to the right heartless, amoral realists (and sometimes racists) and their opponents to the left pacifistic appeasers to evil, some opprobrium is in order.  But that opprobrium should be limited to foreign affairs.  The neoconservative revolution in domestic policy has already happened.  Welfare reform passed over a decade ago, despite a liberal resurgence, wide-eyed social engineering projects like school-busing is still frowned upon.

The empirical style of conservatism, in which conservative policies were justified using modern social science, is still very much in vogue. Just look at David Frum’s Comeback or the variety attempts by conservatives like Stanley Kurtz and Maggie Gallagher to make the secular case against gay marriage by claiming (wrongly, in my view) that gay marriage hurts marriage as an institution and that institution provides a variety of societal goods. I’d argue that despite ideological differences, the style and objectives of Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Ramesh Ponnuru, Daniel Casse, Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin are very reminiscent of the original neoconservatives.  This is a provincial interpretation.  But I think that neoconservatism could be defined outside of its cultural box of “jews in the early 1970s reacting against flawed liberal social policy” and instead could be described as a tendency to explain and generate conservative policies using, in a very basic sense, liberal values and intuitions.

What I mean is that neoconservatives are more likely to use the liberal moral senses, in the schema of Jonathan Haidt, of “harm” and “reciprocity” to justify conservative polices rather than just appealing to “honor” or “ingroup” or “purity.” But you will surely say, don’t many of the so-called neoconservatives you mentioned reject Haidt’s work, doesn’t Leon Kass, a neo-conservative if there ever was one, base most of his philosophical project on the “wisdom of repugnance?”  Well, yes, he does, and Ross Douthat isn’t about to abandon in-group preference and become some sort of cosmopolitan egalitarian.  But look at how conservatives justify their preference for purity and in group preference over more abstract claims like harm or reciprocity.  What was once just prejudice has turned into an argument grounded in evolutionary science and social science showing that people’s bonds are more readily forged with those in their in-group and that these bonds are the making of a decent society.  This is just Burke rewritten for the 20th and 21st centuries.

But the problem is that these arguments from neo-conservatives aren’t exactly floating to the top in the Republican party or the conservative movement in general.  Except in foreign policy.  That’s where neo-conservative were actually able to gain a foothold in a party whose domestic policy is dominated on one hand by Norquistian tax cutters and by the other reactionary evangelicals.  And so, neo-conservatism has become associated with Iraq, as it should be.  That’s because most people aren’t like me and can read Peter Berkowitz’s articles in Policy Review of Yuval Levin in Commentary and pleasanty nod along, thinking what they right is interesting if wrong headed.  Instead, the neoconservatives got their chance to really shape policy in Iraq…and look what happened.

And it’s certainly unfortunate that such an intellectually stimulating and historically important tradition had to debase itself on such a misguided, disastrous war.  But debase themselves – and this country – they did.  And so neoconservative will be used as an epithet to describe war supporters.  And no, Russel Berman, it’s not because liberals see neo-conservative as especially mendacious traitors (most liberals probably couldn’t give you the Spark Notes history of neoconservatism, it’s because we think the Iraq War is a total fucking mess.  It’s fitting that the faction of ideas is now hanging for its one big idea.  It may not be entirely just, but it’s certainly appropriate.