{"id":133883,"date":"2019-05-20T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=133883"},"modified":"2019-05-19T09:56:38","modified_gmt":"2019-05-19T08:56:38","slug":"neo-cons-origin-of-the-species","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/05\/neo-cons-origin-of-the-species\/","title":{"rendered":"Neo-Cons: Origin of the Species"},"content":{"rendered":"

18 May 2019 –<\/em> \u2018Neo-conservative\u2019 \u2013 or \u2018neo-con\u2019 \u2013 is nowadays the most common term of reference is the discourse about American foreign policy. So ubiquitous has it become that the casual reader understandably might be confused as to whether it isn\u2019t in fact a pronoun with plural antecedent nouns. That is a common phenomenon in Washington where phrases like \u2018neo-con\u2019 are used neither for clear communication nor to obscure ulterior purpose \u2013 but rather as a device to avoid thinking altogether. Its calculated disuse, therefore, could serve a valuable public end. So drastic a response should be avoided, though, since the term\u2019s origins, mutations and spread are revealing of how the United States\u2019 views itself in relation to the world.<\/p>\n

Before embarking on an etymological exploration, a few prefatory remarks are in order.\u00a0 One, neo-conservativism is as much a state of feeling as it is a state-of-mind. Two, such logical thinking as occurs among its devotees is deductive \u2013 downplaying empirical data and encouraging ad hominem<\/em> conclusions and pronouncements.\u00a0 Finally, it is a highly adulterated species of doctrine. It has interbred with several other intellectual and ideological entities to produce a hybrid \u2013 a hybrid whose behavior reveals its mixed genetic inheritance. It is as if we homo sapiens<\/em> had assimilated a large infusion of DNA from Neanderthal, Denisovian and other humanoid primates which makes us act rather differently from from the hairless ape that originated in Africa.<\/p>\n

Origins of the Species<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The first identifiable neo-conservatives recognized by political anthropologists appeared in the late 1960s in the asphalt jungles of East Coast cities. The Manhattan canyons were its Rift Valley. Their cranial capacity was exceptionally large \u2013 giving them at first a natural advantage in the competition to fill the evolutionary niche opened by the environmental traumas of the time. Those convention shattering developments registered across the entire country, thereby creating fertile conditions for the new creed\u2019s success in moving rapidly beyond the asphalt jungle and its elitist denizens. Hence, it\u2019s spread across the veldt of North America.<\/p>\n

The most potent shock was administered by the great socio-cultural-political upheaval of the 1960s. The counter-culture movement was multi-dimensional. Its initial mobilizing themes were Civil Rights and resistance to the War in Vietnam.\u00a0\u00a0 At the time, America\u2019s liberal elite were uniformly strong supporters of the former cause and opponents of the latter cause.\u00a0 The second is easily forgotten. Liberal Democrats were uniformly anti-Communist, anti-Soviet and anti-PRC. This was a matter of conviction. The only Cold War issue on which their position diverged from that of the Republican mainstream was nuclear arms control. They supported Kennedy\u2019s Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and rejected any idea of nuclear war-fighting (as well as roll-back in Eastern Europe). Otherwise, they were no less aggressive in their backing of an all-out, global campaign to prevent the spread of Communism (as was Kennedy).<\/p>\n

Only one Democratic Senator (Ernest Gruening of Alaska) voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (the other being maverick independentWayne Morse). There was virtually no debate within the party or its intellectual wing about the premises underlying the open-ended American commitment to the war. That did not change until the TET offensive of February 1968, the fall-off in popular support (until then overwhelmingly in favor), Senator Gene McCarthy\u2019s surprising success and then the blow dealt by Bobby Kennedy\u2019s defection. Those who were coalescing into what became known as neo-cons numbered among the loyal guard who kept faith with the war effort. By the time that position became increasingly untenable in the 1970s, they were full-time warriors in a much wider campaign to save the Democratic Party and the United States from radicalism.<\/p>\n

Mounting anxiety about the radical methods of the New Left<\/em> exemplified by SDS, the Black Panthers and the violent Weathermen widened the gap between the neo-cons and those who rallied around George McGovern. People like Pat Moynihan, Nat Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, et al remained New Dealers on domestic issues (for the most part) but saw that legacy being undermined by the New Left and the phenomenon\u2019s exploitation by Nixon to drain support from the Democratic Party. A concrete issue was affirmative action for minorities (blacks in those days) that was seen as discriminatory by many working class, \u2018ethnic\u2019 democratic voters.<\/p>\n

This \u201cMacedonia\u201d of discontents was laced with resentment and distaste for the \u201ccultural\u201d dimension of the Cultural Revolution. On those matters, most of the neo-cons were adherents to the conventions of post-war America. 1950s society was experienced as a healthy crystallization of intrinsic American virtues with the New Deal corrective. In purely economic terms, they were right \u2013 insofar as wealth distribution, opportunity and stable expectations were far more enlightened than they are in today\u2019s plutocratic America.\u00a0 It\u2019s aggressive challenge by a generation of young radicals made them recoil.<\/p>\n

(Re)-Enter the USSR<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

With Vietnam on the way to becoming forgotten as just a smudge on America\u2019s pageant of progress, neo-con attention focused on two issues: the restoration of national commitment to the country\u2019s wide-ranging security engagements\/interests; and standing up to a Soviet Union allegedly emboldened by the United States\u2019 weakness. This is the period when the former Democratic liberals inter-bred with Republican hawks.<\/em><\/p>\n

The matters then the object of intense debate have a moldy look from today\u2019s perspective \u2013 except that their offspring and the passions aroused at the time are experiencing a belated lease on life in the Trump era. Most salient was the question of whether d\u00e9tente with Moscow was desirable or even possible. It shadowed debates on policy choices ranging from the terms of a nuclear arms race, Russia\u2019s spreading influence in the Horn of Africa (Somalia) and West Africa (Angola \u2013 where Cubans were fighting to defend a self-declared Marxist warlord from a South African and Washington backed warlord), West Germany\u2019s Ost-Politik, the Helsinki Accords, and Che\u2019s threat to assorted Latin American oligarchs.<\/p>\n

The contest was won by the hawks, on most issues \u2013 and certainly in regard to the overall frame-of-reference, thanks to the USSR\u2019s intervention in Afghanistan and the unrelated Mullahs revolution in Iran that followed on its heels. American political elites were in consensus that the country was in danger, that the Soviet Union was a renewed threat to core American interests, that America had to shed the shroud of Vietnam (invade Grenada), and the military budget greatly expanded. Ronald Reagan\u2019s 1980 victory punctuated that turning-point.<\/p>\n

Neo-Cons became strong backers of Reagan\u2019s muscular foreign policy, adding their voices to the high-pitched anti-Communist rhetoric.\u00a0 This was the era of the Sandinistas, the Contras, the insidious implantation of Communism just 500 miles from Tombstone, Arizona. Some took positions in his administrations. Some gathered on the staffs on ultra-hawkish Democratic Senators like Scoop Jackson of Washington State (Richard Perle). Others joined conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise institute and the Heritage Foundation. They also infiltrated what had been liberal think tanks \u2013 gradually transforming them from within to the point where today all are carbon copies of each other. In the process, they lost their identification as New Deal Democrats on the entire gamut of domestic issues. In this, they trail-blazed the trajectory of the Democratic Party as a whole which, for 25 years now, has become hawkish abroad and corporate-friendly at home. That phenomenon makes it difficult to singularize neo-cons today as inherently different from the Democratic mainstream or most Republicans on security issues \u2013 other than in the packaging. We\u2019re all \u201cNeanderthals\u201d now.<\/em><\/p>\n

For a decade, the neo-cons \u2013 and their partners \u2013 were in limbo. Not in the wilderness since the cohort, fellow-travelers and the like-minded occupied most positions of influence \u2013 in government, in the think tanks, in the MSM and even academia. As a collectivity, though, they were less identifiable \u2013 a victim of their own success, and of an America basking in its post-Cold triumphalism. We won because of our ideals, our economic robustness, our dedication \u2013 or mainly because of our might (although the neo-cons never stopped arguing that the Soviet Union collapsed because we outspent them on useless arms). If fact, the USSR collapsed because of Mikhail Gorbachev \u2013 the last utopian Leninist.<\/p>\n

Attention was focused on neo-liberalism, not neo-conservatism<\/em>. It was the global spread of finance-driven capitalism that was consolidating the hard-won peace \u2013 ushering in an age of prosperity based peace grounded on OUR<\/em> values. That was the Clinton (and then Obama) perspective. How disconcerting for the neo-cons who wanted more direct, tangible control of the world\u2019s affairs!<\/p>\n

They did not share this vision of a brave new world. They weren\u2019t content to ride the historic wave of liberal teleology \u2013 with just a nudge here and a kick there. These self-declared realists saw a unique opportunity to establish the United States\u2019 dominance as the master-builder and overseer of a global order than would ensconce American paramountcy for the foreseeable future. Without rival, without countervailing force, they felt that we were free to shape the international system as a potter shapes clay. The leading figures in this campaign were not neo-cons in the historical sense \u2013 albeit some of them emerged from that milieu. They were a self-conscious elite cadre of hyper-nationalists (Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney), true believers in America\u2019s Manifest Destiny, bureaucratic empire builders devoted to restoring the glory of the Pentagon and the Intelligence agencies, and those na\u00efve souls who wanted the entire world to serve as their playground without adjusting any of their \u201cAmericanism.\u201d\u00a0 A powerful impetus was added by Israel sympathizers and the Zionist lobby.<\/p>\n

The last included the Christian Right. Radical Evangelicals provided a fertile recruiting ground for warriors in the political battle to marshal American power to remake the world in its image.\u00a0 That fit quite nicely into the Chino\u2019s (Christians In Name Only) apocalyptic Revelation of a Divinely inspired victory of the Believers over the Infidels. So, they became stout backers of the Providential campaign against the forces of darkness who impeded the American-led march to fulfill the promise of destiny. Their joining forces with the Neo-Cons and, later, R2P crowd opened access to the devout of the Bible Belt \u2013 some of whom found it easy to redirect their latent anti-Semitism from Jews to Muslim Arabs. In a bizarre irony, Evangelicals became ardent backers of hard-line Israel politicos and policies. They even began to travel around the U.S. in order to march in pro-Israel rallies. In theological terms, of course, those Israelis (and other Jews) who would not accept Jesus at his Second Coming would perish as the Believers looked on from the right hand of Christ. That prospect, though, does not cause Bibi Netanyahu or Jared Kushner to lose any sleep.<\/p>\n

The neo-con crusaders were well-organized, well-funded, experienced navigators in Washington\u2019s corridors of power, and willful. Their aims and purposes were no secret. A declaration of faith was authored by Paul Wolfowitz in February 1992 from his post in the Pentagon. <\/em>It took the form of a draft strategic blueprint for a New American Century. That phrase was adopted as the name for a foundation created the next year to propagate the creed during the Clinton interregnum. The paper leaked \u2013 causing embarrassment (temporary) for Bush the Elder\u2019s administration where neither the President, Secretary James Baker, nor NSC Advisor Brent Scowcroft were prepared to sign on to so audacious a scheme. Wolfowitz\u2019s plan, nonetheless, was inspired Gospel for its coterie of adherents whose proselytizing was pursued relentlessly \u2013 and effectively.<\/p>\n

The Wolfowitz Grand Strategy was guided by these postulates:<\/strong><\/p>\n