Lunging leftward.(neoconservatism in Australia)

• Author: Gottfried, Paul
• Position: 160220527
• Pages: 57(9)

A feature article in Intercollegiate Review (Fall 2006), which presents itself as an appeal from the Old Neoconservatives to the younger ones, makes a point that is worth revisiting. Like the author of this essay, Daniel Mahoney, I too have observed a definite shift toward the left in the identifiable positions of neoconservatives (whether or not they continue to call themselves this); moreover, this trend has been going on for several decades without seeming to slow down. This tendency is apparent as a series of reversals on certain cultural and social issues that had been foundational for neoconservative thinking.

In Gary Dorrien's The Neoconservative Mind published in 1994, it is shown how far to the right Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter and Irving Kristol had once stood in their views of civil rights, gays, the alleged evils of McCarthyism, and feminism in comparison to both today's Republican Party and later neoconservatives. Note that it is not easy for me to make this observation, as perhaps the longest and certainly most relentless critic of the neoconservative persuasion. But for attacks on the cult of gay and feminist victims, it is hard to beat issues of Commentary from the 'seventies and 'eighties, which go beyond anything in their reactionary frankness that one now sees in the Republican press. And long before the neoconservatives came to honour Martin Luther King as a secular saint, bewail McCarthyism, and sign on to gay marriage, one encountered in the neoconservative publications of yesteryear searing articles on civil rights leaders of the 1960s and 1970s, discussions of the alleged link between homosexuality and military defeatism, and warnings from Irving Kristol against "anti-McCarthyites," as alleged Soviet sympathisers.

According to a prominent realist theorist on international relations, James Kurth, the overriding reason why neoconservatives have moved toward the social left is their pursuit of a liberal internationalist foreign policy. Their Wilsonian, or neo-Wilsonian goals, according to Kurth, drove the neoconservative second generation, grouped around William Kristol and his Weekly Standard, into building an expediential alliance, stretching leftward as well as including a Republican base. The neoconservatives' preoccupation with Israel and Israeli security brought them a network of supporters among ardent Zionists in the Democratic camp. This well-developed base of support centres on foreign policy and, more broadly, on the "war against terror" that the neoconservatives have promoted in the Bush Administration. It should therefore come as no surprise that neoconservatives have rallied passionately to Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, who successfully took on the anti-war Democrats in his home state of Connecticut, and to other self-declared social liberals who endorse neoconservative foreign policy positions.

The Weekly Standard advocacy of a presidential ticket consisting of Rudolph Giuliani and Joe Lieberman exemplifies the second-generation neoconservative strategy of a broad-based alliance, built on shared views about the Middle East and liberal internationalism. What is missing from this politics is a socially traditionalist cast, an abandonment that Irving Kristol in effect justified when he announced in the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that "the cultural war has been lost". This grim announcement however did not keep the older Kristol from reporting in the same venue three months later the advent of "the coming conservative century".

Although a shared stress on foreign policy has contributed to neoconservative flexibility on domestic issues, a point developed persuasively by Professor Kurth in Orbis (Fall 2006), there is another cause for the redirection that has taken place. Neoconservatives are lunging leftward with the rest of our political class, a trend that is evident in Europe's multicultural and post-Christian society even more dramatically than in the United States. Neoconservatives took charge of the American Right in the 1980s partly because of their relatively cosy relations with the liberal establishment. Unlike the more traditional American Right, the neoconservatives had already established ties to the moderate left; thus they were not marginalised or scorned, in the same way as had happened to such Old Right worthies as Frank Meyers, Russell Kirk and M.E. Bradford.

All of this is true but should not overshadow something equally relevant, that whatever we choose to call it, the establishment Right dances to a leftist band. A "moderate conservative" must pay attention to his left flank if only...