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The Michigan Socialist | News |
National News / Analysis
The dialectics of neoconservatism
From the Old
Left to the New Right
By MATT ERARD
The Michigan Socialist
SINCE THE BUILD-UP to the U.S. invasion of Iraq,
the term, “neocon,” has become somewhat of a household word.
Generally it is attributed to those who advocate
the principle positions of the Bush regime: unilaterally engaging in
wars of conquest, skyrocketing increases in corporate welfare and
the military budget, and gutting essential social services that
benefit the poor and working-class while spending without any regard
to the deficit.
To fully understand the Bush doctrine, however, it
is essential to understand that the philosophy of neoconservatism is
far deeper than the whims of a foolish president to keep his
corporate donors happy and ensure his re-election.
Despite their frequent tactical errors and
political setbacks, the neocons represent the most calculated and
determined political current we have seen on the American Right
since the time of Kissinger, albeit far more dangerous.
What is most surprising, although not most
shocking, about the philosophy of neoconservatism is its origins.
The first generation of neocons has their roots not in the older
waves of American conservatism, but in the opposite movement to the
one the name of their philosophy would suggest.
Those who now lead the American New Right began on
the American Old Left.
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Neocon Rogue’s Gallery (from
top to bottom, left to right): Max Shachtman; Jeanne
Kirkpatrick; Paul Wolfowitz; Richard Perle; Elliot Abrams;
William Kristol; Linda Chavez; Carl Gershman. |
Many of the most powerful and prominent neocons
today began their political careers in the Socialist Party,
Socialist Party youth branch: the Young Peoples Socialist League,
and Socialist Party splinter group, Social Democrats USA.
Such figures include Special Assistant to the
President Elliot Abrams, State Department appointee Pen Kemble,
National Endowment for Democracy Chairman Carl Gershman, leading
neocon author, Joshua Muravchik, former foreign policy adviser under
Reagan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Bush’s original appointee for
Secretary of Labor, Linda Chavez.
Non-members such as Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz, member and former chairman of the Defense Policy
Board Richard Perle, and Defense Policy Board member William Kristol
were also well connected to the same political current within these
organizations.
NEARLY ALL OF these figures came into Socialist
Party or one of its affiliates during one of the party’s most
regressive and divisive periods.
In 1958, the Socialist Party merged with the
Independent Socialist League, a “Trotskyist” group led by Max
Shachtman.
Not long beforehand, Shachtman, a former
“Trotskyist” himself, had drastically shifted his viewpoint on
Communist movements around the world, acquiring a “Third Camp”
ideology of equal opposition to both American capitalism and
(“foreign”) “Communism.”
Bent on using the ISL merger to take control of
the Socialist Party, Shachtman advocated what was often referred to
as “realignment strategy,” in which socialists should attempt to
realign with and subsequently transform the Democratic Party while
concealing their socialist identities.
As both support and resistance toward realignment
strategy in the Socialist Party increased, Shachtman’s philosophical
and programmatic drift to the rightwing followed.
Shachtman revised his previous “Third Camp”
ideology to a new perspective that American capitalism was
incomparably superior to “Communism” and should be supported
accordingly.
By 1972, Shachtman and his supporters had gained a
majority in the Socialist Party and consequently blocked a
resolution opposing the Vietnam War. Soon after, the Shachtmanites
launched Social Democrats USA as a new organization to further his
strategy of realignment.
Among Shachtman’s most ardent supporters were the
young Socialist Party and SDUSA members who would shape the future
of the neoconservative ideology.
Bypassing the New Left movement altogether and
trading their Old Left revolutionary zeal for placatory liberalism,
many of the young future neocons were attracted to the arch-Zionist
and Cold Warrior Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, whose
hawkish views made pivotal contributions to the neocons’
perspective.
Crediting Jackson alone, however, for bridging the
gap between the neocons post-Shachtmanite liberalism and the
philosophy they subscribe to today would be a grave inaccuracy
without noting the crucial influence on nearly all neocons from a
University of Chicago professor by the name of Leo Strauss.
STRAUSS WAS KNOWN for his philosophy based on the
“politics of deception,” primarily influenced by the philosophies of
Niccolo Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, existentialist and Nazi
philosopher Martin Heidegger, and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The chief tenants of Straussian philosophy are
aggressive nationalism, the absence of moral truth, intensive
secrecy and “perpetual deception” between rulers and the ruled,
appeals to religion as a means of controlling the masses, and
support for an aristocratic elite.
According to Straussian analyst and University of
Calgary political science professor Shadia Drury, Strauss believed
that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no
morality and there is only one natural right — the right of the
superior to rule over the inferior.”
It was the influence of Leo Strauss combined with
other pre-neoconservative thinkers such as Norman Podhoretz and
Irving Kristol that led the former Shachtmanite bloc of neocons to
become ideologically linked with other, now-prominent Straussian
adherents: Attorney General John Ashcroft, Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas, Office of National Drug Control Policy Director
William J. Bennett and former Vice-President Dan Quayle.
Straussian influence today has not only developed
a chokehold on the White House, State Department, Justice Department
and the Pentagon, but has also permeated through educational
institutions with an increasing level of influence over modern-day
academics.
Neocons represent the only major segment of
contemporary conservatism of which the vast majority of its
adherents have post-graduate degrees.
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Leo Strauss (left) and Martin
Heidegger were prominent supporters of the German Nazis before
going on to become the philosophical leaders of the
neoconservatives. |
The website
Straussian.Net
lists over 200 professors in universities across the United States
that it claims subscribe to the philosophy of Leo Strauss.
Straussian and neoconservative professors have had
most success in political science departments, in which they are
coming increasingly close to making the discipline their own, as
Marxists have accomplished to some extent with sociology and
right-libertarians have accomplished with economics.
Much of Straussian influence among modern day
academics during the past decade can be attributed to the
best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind, written
by Straussian disciple Allan Bloom in 1988.
The book, in which Bloom directly references his
teacher only once, was a source of regular outcry in the early
nineties due to its influential role in censorship policies and
restrictions on academic freedom.
ALTHOUGH ANY remnants of socialist principles
among today’s leading neocons have diminished entirely, what they
have retained from their “Trotskyist” backgrounds is the underlying
Marxian philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism —
viewing class as the predominant factor in politics and economics,
and the class struggle as the predominant basis of history.
What the Straussian influence has resulted in,
however, is a fundamental inverse in Marxian principle — i.e., no
longer viewing class struggle from the perspective of the working
class, but rather from the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie.
It is this very reason that we hear such
unprecedented comments in the media from the Bush regime such as
casually dismissing critical responses to Bush’s tax cuts as
attempts at “class-war.”
For those familiar with the Marxian and
“Trotskyist” view of capitalism’s progression, it need not be stated
that such an inverse approach to Marxian philosophy by those in
power would result in a refined and developed approach to
imperialism based on an awareness of the near inevitability of
capitalism’s eventual collapse.
Not only would such a form of imperialism be more
overt than imperialistic endeavors in the past century, it would
contain a more holistic understanding of the historical climate
surrounding the exploitation of the world’s population and resources
in pursuit of profit, as well as the revolutionary and international
potential of the working-class to resist.
The internationalist perspective from the neocons’
Marxian and “Trotskyist” influence coupled with the nationalist
perspective from their Straussian influence provides a rather
interesting and paradoxical combination within their viewpoint.
Understanding the potential revolutionary response
to unprecedented levels of imperialism by an internationally unified
working class and the setbacks in potential gains that a paralleled
international unification of the ruling class would cause, the
neocons have determined that the most appropriate response is to
move rapidly forward in controlling the markets of other wealthy
capitalist countries in addition to those in poorer countries.
Through this strategy, their gains are no longer
solely economic, but also political, serving as a centralized shield
against political insurrection.
Such a strategy was exemplified by the compelling
need to go to war with Iraq.
Not only does Iraq sit in the heart of the only
region of the world that the United States has not been relatively
successful in controlling through economic institutions such as the
WTO, IMF, and World Bank, it will also likely grant the United
States the ability to control the oil markets of its capitalist
former allies in Europe who are substantially more dependent than
the U.S. on Middle Eastern oil.
BUILDING UPON THE models set by former presidents
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the neocons aim to fully
establish a unipolar world in which the U.S. has military
superiority over, not only every other country, but all other
countries combined.
The 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq have been used
as cases in point for a world in which other countries have no
choice but to either give the green light to the U.S. for all of its
military pursuits while pretending that a semblance of international
law still exists or to challenge the U.S. politically and later pay
the consequences as U.S. military strength is flexed and unleashed
without regard.
Cheney’s frequent proclamations that the “War on
Terror” will continue indefinitely across generations is an
inversion of Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution into a
well-derived theory of permanent imperialism and inexhaustible
nationalism. In organizational form, the neocons of today are best
represented by the rightwing think tank,
Project
for the New American Century.
PNAC, currently chaired by the son of former Young
People’s Socialist League member Irving Kristol, was founded in 1997
by such prominent neocons as Abrams, Bennett, Podhoretz, Quayle and
Wolfowitz, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, former
presidential candidate Steve Forbes, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush.
The stated mission of PNAC is “American global
leadership [read: domination].”
The front of their webpage, which displays a map
of the world allowing the viewer to click on any region to see
PNAC’s plan for it, also links to PNAC’s statement of principles, a
document calling for massive increases in defense spending and a
foreign policy based on American leadership and interests abroad.
The organization receives much of its funding from
the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a foundation established
under the principle of absolute employers’ control, after the
business of its founders was forced to recognize unions, hire
African Americans, and pay its female employees as much as it paid
to males. With over half a billion in assets, it is arguably the
most powerful rightwing foundation in the country.
PNAC received some media attention after the Iraq
War when it was discovered that the organization sent an openly
published letter to Bill Clinton in 1997 calling for the invasion of
Iraq and citing Saddam Hussein being a significant threat to the
world’s supply of oil as a justification.
PNAC’s most telling documents can be found on its
“Publications and Reports” page, in particular its document titled
“Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which has often been perceived to
be a blueprint for the foreign policy of the Bush regime.
The document, published in September 2000, calls
for fighting and decisively winning simultaneous theater wars around
the world, states that increasing U.S. forces in the Gulf transcends
the issue of the Saddam Hussein regime (which serves only as an
immediate justification for doing so), calls for complete control of
space and cyberspace, calls for the establishment of a world-wide
command and control system for ballistic missiles, and says that
this “process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent
some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
From the parts of this document that have already
been accomplished by the Bush regime since its publication, it is
very clear that September 11, 2001, was that catastrophic and
catalyzing event.
The extent to which political setbacks and
world-wide resistance to Bush’s wars will stall this “process of
transformation” remains to be seen.
DESPITE THE DEGREE of danger that the neocons
present to the world, to believe that simply voting the neocons out
of office and replacing them with Democrats is a fatal mistake.
The neocons have not risen to power from their
level of political savvy, but rather from material conditions that
capitalism has created in the world.
The neocons represent a level of crisis in the
profit system in which intensified imperialism is essential for
expanding to new markets and maximizing profits.
This crisis is not a result of the capitalist
system’s miscalculated errors, but rather its natural development.
This new wave of imperialism is also a response to the collapse of
the Soviet Union, a once great impediment to U.S. unipoliarity.
The Democratic Party does not remain unaffected by
this stage of capitalism. Democratic presidential front runner John
Kerry, a supporter of the U.S. occupation of Iraq who also voted for
many of Bush’s most loathsome proposals including both wars and the
USA-PATRIOT Act, is a member of the “New Democrats,” formally known
as the Democratic
Leadership Council (DLC).
The “New Democrats” represent a similar faction in
the Democratic Party to Tony Blair’s “New Labour” faction in the
British Labour Party. The temporal proximity of these two movements
across national boundaries is no coincidence.
Both represent historically mainstream liberal
parties moving in accordance with worldwide political and economic
change and embracing a rightward, more anti-labor and
pro-military-interventionist shift.
The DLC has established its own equivalent to the
Project for the New American Century, called the
Progressive
Policy Institute, an official DLC-sponsored think-tank
advocating the establishment of a “third way” that embraces the “new
economy” and moves beyond the “left-right debate.”
While sharing a more subtle contempt for workers’
rights in the domestic sphere, the PPI fundamentally differs from
PNAC by advocating a more multilateral approach to imperialism, an
approach in which the United States cooperates with rather than
subverts its Great Power capitalist allies.
The un-televised debate between the “New
Democratic” and neoconservative segments of the ruling class this
election year will primarily surround the issue of the extent and
current method to which we engage in the “process of transformation”
that PNAC has laid out.
It will be a debate over how much to stall this
process and the degree to which older methods of conquest both at
home and abroad will be used in relation to newer ones.
Regardless of which faction wins the White House
in 2004, it is only workers’ internationalism and the transformation
from capitalism to democratic socialism that can permanently resist
this process.
The stakes only get higher with time. |
