The Neoconservative Père et Fils

Michael Signer: Neocon Fathers and Sons

EARLIER THIS year, a new think tank called the Foreign Policy Initiative was launched by the well-known neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan. In September, the organization held a luxurious conference at the W Hotel in Washington, D.C. titled “Advancing and Defending Democracy,” featuring Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Newt Gingrich.

Over a spread of grilled chicken salad served with avocado and fresh French rolls, Romney inveighed against Barack Obama as a “reluctant and timid defender of freedom.” Heads nodded approvingly; sparkling water was poured; cheers spontaneously broke out. The neoconservatives’ brio was impressive. They are, after all, again drawing battle lines–not only untroubled by their dismal record during the Bush administration but somehow emboldened by their 2008 defeat.

But while this generation of neoconservatives may be celebrating their new role as the opposition, the recent death of Irving Kristol, the father of neoconservatism, should give rise to an inquiry into the movement’s troubling evolution. There is perhaps no more respectful way for progressives to commemorate Kristol’s legacy than to explore the decline of his thought—as dramatically evidenced by the contrast of Irving Kristol’s ideas and those of his son, Bill. Irving Kristol placed practical experience at the heart of his political theory. By contrast, his son would choose the inducements of pure theory—of a foreign policy chasing dreams rather than the hardscrabble earth. Where a certain humility drove the ideas of Kristol père, a certain hubris has driven those of Kristol fils. These intellectual differences have had profound consequences for world events, including the disastrous conduct of the war in Iraq.

NEOCONSERVATISM, AS formulated by Irving Kristol, originated in privation, intellectual combat, and a reckoning with the harsh practical consequences of dangerous ideas. Irving Kristol’s parents were Eastern Europeans who arrived in America in the 1890s. His father was a garment worker and later a clothing subcontractor; his mother gave birth to Irving in Brooklyn in 1920. When he was sixteen years old, he enrolled at the City College of New York (CCNY). Instead of paying much attention to classes, however, he dove into the extempore debate among the students.

The 1930s were a fervent time to be a student at CCNY. Fascism was taking hold in Italy, and communism was surging in the Soviet Union. The sometimes cheerful, sometimes angry clashes among students who were trying to decide where the world should go at this momentous period helped to launch an intellectual movement that was skeptical about the applications of pure theory.

Though it took decades for it to become “neoconservatism,” the roots of the movement lay in the young intellectuals’ effort to steer America away from the shoals of Stalinism, the horrible outgrowth of what had begun, decades earlier, as an ambitious political theory. This may help explain why Irving Kristol’s own political theory, for all its lushness and bombast, often counseled caution and modesty. In a lecture he gave in 1970, he pronounced that “moral earnestness and intellectual sobriety” were the “elements . . . most wanted in a democracy.” Strikingly, he applied this ethic of restraint to democracy itself. In 1978, he wrote, “It is the fundamental fallacy of American foreign policy to believe, in face of the evidence, that all peoples, everywhere, are immediately ‘entitled’ to a liberal constitutional government—and a thoroughly democratic one at that.”

By contrast, in the years to come his son fixed neoconservative foreign policy on abstractions and evils—on metaphysics rather than physics—particularly when it came to democracy. As a result, the striking feature of Bill Kristol’s political theory is not the ideas but the extravagance surrounding them. In a now-famous 1996 Foreign Affairs article co-authored with Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol wrote that Republicans should endorse a policy of “benevolent hegemony” that was “good for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world.” “America,” he added, “has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the world’s monsters, most of which can be found without much searching.”

Monsters, power, and dreams—in retrospect, the Iraq War seems so simple. Not too many steps lie between this chthonic vision of our enemies and the bellicose overreaches of the George W. Bush administration expressed in the invasion of Iraq, the impatience with state-building in Afghanistan, and the retraction from multilateralism in various critical treaties.

The seminal arguments for the 2003 war were laid out in The War Over Iraq, a book that Bill Kristol co-wrote with Lawrence Kaplan and that was published on the eve of the 2003 invasion. Kristol and Kaplan argued the United States should invade Iraq in order to establish a democracy that would be “in accord with American principles”: “According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 U.S. troops may be required to police the war’s aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries’ forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two.” These estimates, to be blunt, were ridiculous.

In 1978, Irving Kristol warned against precisely such unhinged optimism. He blamed “Wilsonian slogans” as the reason that “American foreign policy began to disregard the obvious for the sake of the quixotic pursuit of impossible ideals.” Unsurprisingly, he offered a dour outlook on idealistic interventionism in his public commentary on the first Iraq War in 1991, when he asserted, “[America’s national security] never implied a commitment to bring the blessings of democracy to the Arab world….[No military] alternative is attractive, since each could end up committing us to govern Iraq. And no civilized person in his right mind wants to govern Iraq.”

This might help solve the mystery of his conspicuous silence during the second Iraq War. As the American Conservative reported in 2005, “[I]n a sense the Iraq War is Bill Kristol’s War as much as it is George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s, and the Standard is the vehicle that made it possible.” Perhaps it was just too awkward, too painful, to publicly confront the unwanted evolution of an ideology he had so carefully nurtured. In stark contrast to his father, the son envisioned a democracy in Iraq that would sprout like Jack’s beanstalk. “After Saddam Hussein has been defeated and Iraq occupied,” Kristol and Kaplan asserted, “installing a decent and democratic government in Baghdad should be a manageable task for the United States.” A “manageable task” became a six-year (and ongoing) commitment of well over 100,000 troops and total appropriations of almost $1 trillion.

In part, the mistakes of Iraq were caused by a stark dismissal of the cautions of early neoconservatism. The original neoconservatives were responding to the perceived weakness of Democrats on Vietnam and military issues and the problems of the welfare state. Their policies still bore the imprint of actual experience, and they were, at least some of the time, chastened by history. But after the cold war ended, many neoconservatives began to fuse their democracy promotion ideal with a vision of America as the only superpower in a post-cold war world. Through its example and its promotion of democracy, the United States would become—in the words of the neoconservative columnist Ben Wattenberg—an “imperium of values.”

Bill Kristol’s neocons certainly desired a free world and a proud, safe, and strong America. Their hearts may have been in the right place. But their quasi-imperial ambitions entailed not only a new unilateralism but often a bull-in-china-shop style. It’s no wonder that Kristol and Kagan savaged James Baker, as a “self-proclaimed pragmatist” in their 1996 Foreign Affairs article. That these words became, self-evidently, terms of mockery tells much of the story. Where Irving Kristol developed a highly qualified political theory marked by elitism and skepticism, Bill Kristol’s ideas instead led to arrogance and idealism bordering on determinism.

FOR IRVING Kristol, neoconservatism was a “persuasion” that was “hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic” and with a “general tone” that was “cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic.” Contrast this with the 1996 Foreign Affairs article, where Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan grimly condemned “a policy of sitting atop a hill and leading by example” as one that “becomes in practice a policy of cowardice and dishonor.”

What’s both amazing and alarming is the resurgence of the audacity of nope in the new era of engagement offered by Barack Obama. At the W Hotel, amid all the finery, it was all too easy to reckon with the dangers of a political vision more interested in power and monsters than ideas and history. A hard-eyed awareness of the neocons’ new ambitions, in light of the true ideas from which they descended, is one way to commemorate the end of what was, by any measure, the extraordinary American life of Irving Kristol.

Michael Signer is adjunct professor at Virginia Tech, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and the author of Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies(Palgrave Macmillan 2009). He is a principal of the Truman National Security Project and in 2009 was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia.