Conservatism, Labels, and American Foreign Policy, Part II

Last night, I begin to look at Conservatism and American Foreign Policy through the lens of three different articles. What we saw is that Francis Fukuyama was a little too vague on the conservatism part but added some insights on the foreign policy side; namely that realism focus on balance of power and military strength while idealists focus on multilateral institutions and agreements. The question we ended with was: is realism tied to conservatism or is the idealist realist axis separate from the conservative liberal one.

Oddly enough I am going to approach this subject through the back door by discussing another term: neo-conservative. Because he is intelligent and quick thinking Mark Byron has already touched on this theme (he actually read the articles in question). The reason for this “look away to see it” type approach is that the second article tries to use this label as an intro to his views on American foreign policy.

And just like Fukuyama he fails to help explain conservatism but does shed some light on foreign policy. The author is Max Boot and the article is entitled “What the Heck is a ‘Neocon.’”

Good question Max, what is a neocon? Max gets it half-right:

The original neocons were a band of liberal intellectuals who rebelled against the Democratic Party’s leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s. At first the neocons clustered around Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. The neocons, in the famous formulation of one of their leaders, Irving Kristol, were “liberals mugged by reality.”

Boot is correct that one of the original impetuses of the neo-conservatives was the apparent willingness of much of the Democratic party to embrace d�tente full bore and pretend as if communism was no longer a threat. But what Boot leaves out is that the “mugged by reality” applies more readily to social issues than it does to foreign policy; despite the fact that many of the neocons were former Marxists. If there was one phrase that described the neocons of this period it would have to be “unintended consequences.” Neocons were intellectuals and academics. They were interested in sociology, psychology, economics, political science, and other social sciences. The reason they were mugged is that they found that the Great Society social programs had failed. The reason they found this out is because they were doing the research. The neocons made their entrance when they combined academic credibility and facts with conservative convictions. Conservatives had long been criticizing the budding welfare and nanny state but they were doing it largely from the perspective of first principles (freedom, constitutionalism, etc.). The neocons brought their social science research to the table and said: “No really the conservatives are right these programs are wrong, they do cause harm.” What is more they brought ideas on how to fix things. This is what conservatism needed. It needed to be more than just a collection of nay Sayers no matter how right or how eloquent. The neocons added a burst of policy-making momentum and credibility just when it was needed. What has made using the term difficult is that a large chunk of the Democratic Party just kept on going left and Ronald Reagan united such a large faction of the center right that things got blury. After a decade of working together in politics, journalism, and in think tanks the neo part became harder to explain. One of the main reasons for this was that the political and philosophical types of conservatism that I mentioned earlier blended. Academics became involved in public policymaking and party politics. Soon most of the neocons were full-fledged members of the GOP; no loner just defined by their unique status in academia or as renegade Democrats.

So is neocon a useful term anymore? Jonah Goldberg doesn’t think so. Historically it can be used to describe the group of New York intellectuals that abandoned the Democratic Party and moved to the right during the late Cold War. Irving Kristol is the obvious figure and in fact is the only one who accepted the label. I think the term still has some use today but its use is minimized the more it is abused.
Boots attempts to locate conservatism, neo or otherwise, is as vague as Fukuyama’s. After takes few paragraphs to take potshots at Pat Buchanan, Boot tries to state what neo-conservatism stands for:

So is “neoconservatism” worthless as a political label? Not entirely. In social policy, it stands for a broad sympathy with a traditionalist agenda and a rejection of extreme libertarianism. Neocons have led the charge to combat some of the wilder excesses of academia and the arts. But there is hardly an orthodoxy laid down by Neocon Central. I, for one, am not eager to ban either abortion or cloning, two hot-button issues on the religious right. On economic matters, neocons–like pretty much all other Republicans, except for Mr. Buchanan and his five followers–embrace a laissez-faire line, though they are not as troubled by the size of the welfare state as libertarians are.

Notice how Boot, like Fukuyama, try to define their terms based on what they are not. Fukuyama wants to make conservatism into classical liberalism while Boot wants neo-conservatism to mean some sort of middle ground between extremes. Both are attempting to make conservatism in their own molds.

So again we are left with no real insight into conservatism. But again that is not really a problem because what Boot really wants, again like Fukuyama, to get to is foreign policy:

But it is not really domestic policy that defines neo-conservatism. This was a movement founded on foreign policy, and it is still here that neo-conservatism carries the greatest meaning, even if its original raison d’�tre–opposition to communism–has disappeared. Pretty much all conservatives today agree on the need for a strong, vigorous foreign policy. There is no constituency for isolationism on the right, outside the Buchananite fever swamps. The question is how to define our interventionism.

Note how he uses the term isolationism and balances it against interventionism. Isolationism is not really a useful term it is really just an insult. Throughout the article boot uses the clear code words to make the other side clearly out of touch. Instead of discussing the merits of non-interventionist policies versus intervention, Boot casually labels Buchanan an isolationist. Again, what Boot is trying to do is lay claim to the middle ground be defining those he disagrees with as extreme.

So what is Boot’s grand meaning for neocon foreign policy? Something he calls “Hard Wilsonianism.” To set this up he snidely dismisses realism:

One group of conservatives believes that we should use armed force only to defend our vital national interests, narrowly defined. They believe that we should remove, or at least disarm, Saddam Hussein, but not occupy Iraq for any substantial period afterward. The idea of bringing democracy to the Middle East they denounce as a mad, hubristic dream likely to backfire with tragic consequences. This view, which goes under the somewhat self-congratulatory moniker of “realism,” is championed by foreign-policy mandarins like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker III.

He then sets up the alternative view:

Many conservatives think, however, that “realism” presents far too crabbed a view of American power and responsibility. They suggest that we need to promote our values, for the simple reason that liberal democracies rarely fight one another, sponsor terrorism, or use weapons of mass destruction. If we are to avoid another 9/11, they argue, we need to liberalize the Middle East–a massive undertaking, to be sure, but better than the unspeakable alternative. And if this requires occupying Iraq for an extended period, so be it; we did it with Germany, Japan and Italy, and we can do it again.

Triumphantly, Boot then announces that this agenda is known as “neo-conservatism.” What Boot is trying to say in his journalistic way, is that neocons are idealists in foreign policy but not lick those crazy leftists. Boot coins the term Hard Wilsonianism to capture this view:

Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson’s championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives. (“Soft Wilsonians,” a k a liberals, place their reliance, in Charles Krauthammer’s trenchant phrase, on paper, not power.) Like Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, “hard Wilsonians” want to use American might to promote American ideals.

Outside of the suspect historical analogies, Boot is finally on to something. What he is on to is a sort of big government conservatism in the international arena. These Hard Wilsonians will set lofty goals and promote American ideals, except they will do it with a hard edge; avoiding the flabby UN and useless disarmament treaties. Unfortunately this has little to do with neo-conservatism and more to do with America’s survival as the sole superpower and an overarching angst at the slipperiness of terrorism as an enemy. Boot’s Hard Wilsoniansim is like the “American Greatness Conservatism” of his compadres at the Weekly Standard. It sounds good until you try and pin it down.

So two articles down and we still have no real insight into conservatism and American foreign policy but we do have a better understanding of the realist versus idealist debate. But we still don’t have a sure answer to our question: Can a conservative be an idealist or an interventionist? Is realism an aspect of conservatism? Boot clearly doesn’t think so despite his confusing mixing of terms. He believes that his modified idealism is conservative or at least neo-conservative.

In the next post, I will turn to the man who claims to speak for a true conservatism, or at least paleo-conservatism, Pat Buchanan.