Is neoconservatism a Jewish movement?
by Prof. Kevin MacDonald Sunday November 02, 2003 at 11:56 PM
Is it "anti-Semitic" to say so?
By Prof. Kevin MacDonald
Over the last year, there's been a torrent of articles on
neoconservatism
raising (usually implicitly) some vexing issues: Are neoconservatives
different
from other conservatives? Is neoconservatism a Jewish movement? Is it
„anti-Semitic‰ to say so?
The dispute between the neocons and more traditional conservatives ˜ „
paleoconservatives‰ ˜ is especially important because the latter now
find
themselves on the outside, looking in on the conservative power
structure.
Hopefully, some of the venom has been taken out of this argument by the
remarkable recent article by neoconservative „godfather‰ Irving Kristol
(„The
Neoconservative Persuasion,‰ Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003). With
commendable
frankness, Kristol admitted that:
„the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem
to
be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in
general,
against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics
suitable to governing a modern democracy.‰
And, equally frankly, Kristol eschewed any attempt to justify U.S.
support
for Israel in terms of American national interest:
„[L]arge nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union
of
yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological
interests
in addition to more material concerns? That is why we feel it necessary
to
defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated
geopolitical
calculations of national interest are necessary.‰
If the US is an „ideological‰ nation, this can only mean that the
motivations of neoconservative ideology are a legitimate subject of
intellectual
inquiry.
For example, it is certainly true that the neocons‚ foreign policy fits
well
with a plausible version of Jewish interests, but is arguably only
tenuously
related to the interests of the U.S. Also, neocons oppose the
isolationism of
important sections of traditional American conservatism. And neocon
attitudes
on issues like race and immigration differ profoundly from those of
traditional mainstream conservatives ˜ but resemble closely the common
attitudes of the
wider American Jewish community.
Count me among those who accept that the Jewish commitment of leading
neoconservatives has become a critical influence on U.S. policies, and
that the
effectiveness of the neoconservatives is greatly enhanced by their
alliance with
the organized Jewish community. In my opinion, this conclusion is based
on solid
data and reasonable inferences. But like any other theory, of course, it
is
subject to reasoned discussion and disproof.
We shouldn‚t be surprised by the importance of ethnicity in human
affairs.
Nor should we be intimidated by charges of anti-Semitism. We should be
able to
discuss these issues openly and honestly. This is a practical matter,
not a
moral one.
Ethnic politics in the U.S. are certainly not limited to Jewish
activism.
They are an absolutely normal phenomenon throughout history and around
the
world.
But for well over half a century, with rare exceptions, Jewish influence
has
been off-limits for rational discussion. Now, however, as the U.S.
acquires an
empire in the Middle East, this ban must inevitably fall away.
My views on these issues are shaped by my research on several other
influential Jewish-dominated intellectual and political movements,
including the
Boasian school of anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt
School of
Social Research, Marxism and several other movements of the radical
left, as well
as the movement to change the ethnic balance of the United States by
allowing
mass, non-traditional immigration.
My conclusion: Contemporary neoconservatism fits into the general
pattern of
Jewish intellectual and political activism I have identified in my work.
I am not, of course, saying that all Jews, or even most Jews, supported
these
movements. Nor did these movements work in concert: some were intensely
hostile to one another. I am saying, however, that the key figures in
these
movements identified in some sense as Jews and viewed their
participation as in some
sense advancing Jewish interests.
In all of the Jewish intellectual and political movements I studied,
there is
a strong Jewish identity among the core figures. All center on
charismatic
Jewish leaders˜people such as Boas, Trotsky and Freud˜ who are revered
as
messianic, god-like figures.
Neoconservatism‚s key founders trace their intellectual ancestry to the
„New
York Intellectuals,‰ a group that originated as followers of Trotskyite
theoretician Max Schactman in the 1930s and centered around influential
journals
like Partisan Review and Commentary (which is in fact published by the
American
Jewish Committee). In the case of neoconservatives, their early identity
as
radical leftist disciples shifted as there began to be evidence of
anti-Semitism
in the Soviet Union. Key figures in leading them out of the political
left
were philosopher Sydney Hook and Elliot Cohen, editor of Commentary.
Such men
as Hook, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and Seymour
Martin
Lipset, were deeply concerned about anti-Semitism and other Jewish
issues. Many
of them worked closely with Jewish activist organizations. After the
1950s,
they became increasingly disenchanted with leftism. Their overriding
concern
was the welfare of Israel.
By the 1970s, the neocons were taking an aggressive stance against the
Soviet
Union, which they saw as a bastion of anti-Semitism and opposition to
Israel.
Richard Perle was the prime organizer of Congressional support for the
1974
Jackson-Vanik Amendment which angered the Soviet Union by linking
bilateral
trade issues to freedom of emigration, primarily of Jews from the Soviet
Union to
Israel and the United States.
Current key leaders include an astonishing number of individuals well
placed
to influence the Bush Administration: (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle,
Douglas
Feith, I. Lewis Libby, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, David Wurmser, Abram
Shulsky), interlocking media and thinktankdom (Bill Kristol, Michael
Ledeen,
Stephen Bryen, John Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes), and the academic world
(Richard
Pipes, Donald Kagan).
As the neoconservatives lost faith in radical leftism, several key
neocons
became attracted to the writings of Leo Strauss, a classicist and
political
philosopher at the University of Chicago. Strauss had a very strong
Jewish
identity and viewed his philosophy as a means of ensuring Jewish
survival in the
Diaspora. As he put it in a 1962 Hillel House lecture, later republished
in Leo
Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker:
„I believe I can say, without any exaggeration, that since a very, very
early
time the main theme of my reflections has been what is called the
ŒJewish
ŒQuestion‚.‰
Strauss has become a cult figure˜the quintessential rabbinical guru with
devoted disciples.
While Strauss and his followers have come to be known as
neoconservatives ˜
and have even claimed to be simply „conservatives‰˜ there is nothing
conservative about their goals. This is most obviously the case in
foreign policy,
where they are attempting to rearrange the entire Middle East in the
interests of
Israel. But it is also the case with domestic policy, where acceptance
of rule
by an aristocratic elite would require a complete political
transformation.
Strauss believed that this aristocracy would be compatible with Jewish
interests.
Strauss notoriously described the need for an external exoteric language
directed at outsiders, and an internal esoteric language directed at
ingroup
members. In other words, the masses had to be deceived.
But actually this is a general feature of the movements I have studied.
They
invariably frame issues in language that appeals to non-Jews, rather
than
explicitly in terms of Jewish interests. The most common rhetoric used
by Jewish
intellectual and political movements has been the language of moral
universalism and the language of science˜languages that appeal to the
educated elites of
the modern Western world. But beneath the rhetoric it is easy to find
statements expressing the Jewish agendas of the principle actors.
For example, anthropologists under the leadership of Boas viewed their
crusade against the concept of „race‰ as, in turn, combating
anti-Semitism. They
also saw their theories as promoting the ideology of cultural pluralism,
which
served perceived Jewish interests because the U.S. would be seen as
consisting
of many co-equal cultures rather than as a European Christian society.
Similarly, psychoanalysts commonly used their theories to portray
anti-Jewish
attitudes as symptoms of psychiatric disorder.
Conversely, the earlier generation of American Jewish Trotskyites
ignored
the horrors of the Soviet Union until the emergence there of
state-sponsored
anti-Semitism.
Neoconservatives have certainly appealed to American patriotic
platitudes in
advocating war throughout the Middle East˜gushing about spreading
American
democracy and freedom to the area, while leaving unmentioned their own
strong
ethnic ties and family links to Israel.
Michael Lind has called attention to the neoconservatives‚ „odd bursts
of
ideological enthusiasm for Œdemocracy‚‰˜ odd because these calls for
democracy
and freedom throughout the Middle East are also coupled with support for
the
Likud Party and other like-minded groups in Israel that are driven by a
vision
of an ethnocentric, expansionist Israel that, to outside observers at
least,
bears an unmistakable (albeit unmentionable) resemblance to apartheid
South
Africa.
These inconsistencies of the neoconservatives are not odd or surprising.
The
Straussian idea is to achieve the aims of the elite ingroup by using
language
designed for mass appeal. War for „democracy and freedom‰ sells much
better
than a war explicitly aimed at achieving the foreign policy goals of
Israel.
Neoconservatives have responded to charges that their foreign policy has
a
Jewish agenda by labeling any such analysis as „anti-Semitic.‰ Similar
charges
have been echoed by powerful activist Jewish organizations like the ADL
and
the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
But at the very least, Jewish neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz,
who were
deeply involved in pushing for the war in Iraq, should frankly discuss
how
their close family and personal ties to Israel have affected their
attitudes on
US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Wolfowitz, however, has refused to discuss this issue beyond terming
such
suggestions „disgraceful.‰
A common argument is that neoconservatism is not Jewish because of the
presence of various non-Jews amongst their ranks.
But in fact, the ability to recruit prominent non-Jews, while
nevertheless
maintaining a Jewish core and a commitment to Jewish interests, has been
a
hallmark˜perhaps the key hallmark˜of influential Jewish intellectual and
political
movements throughout the 20th century. Freud‚s commented famously on the
need
for a non-Jew to represent psychoanalysis, a role played by Ernest Jones
and
C. G. Jung. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were the public face of
Boasian
anthropology. And, although Jews represented over half the membership of
both
the Socialist Party and the Communist Party USA at various times,
neither
party ever had Jews as presidential candidates and no Jew held the top
position in
the Communist Party USA after 1929.
In all the Jewish intellectual and political movements I reviewed,
non-Jews
have been accepted and given highly-visible roles. Today, those roles
are
played most prominently by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld whose ties
with
neoconservatives go back many years. It makes excellent psychological
sense to have
the spokespeople for any movement resemble the people they are trying to
convince.
In fact, neoconservatism is rather unusual in the degree to which policy
formulation ˜ as opposed to implementation ˜ is so predominantly Jewish.
Perhaps
this reflects U.S. conditions in the late 20th century.
All the Jewish intellectual and political movements I studied were
typified
by a deep sense of orthodoxy˜a sense of „us versus them.‰ Dissenters are
expelled, usually amid character assassination and other recriminations.
This has certainly been a feature of the neocon movement. The classic
recent
example of this „We vs. They‰ world is David Frum‚s attack on
„unpatriotic
conservatives‰ as anti-Semites. Any conservative who opposes the Iraq
war as
contrary to U.S. interests and who notes the pro-Israeli motivation of
many of
the important players, is not to be argued with, but eradicated. „We
turn our
backs on them.‰ This is not the spirit out of which the Anglo-American
parliamentary tradition was developed, and in fact was not endorsed by
other
non-Jewish pro-war conservatives.
Jewish intellectual and political movements have typically had ready
access
to prestigious mainstream media channels, and this is certainly true for
the
neocons. The anchoring by the Washington Post of the columns of Charles
Krauthammer and Robert Kagan and by the New York Times of William
Safire's
illustrates this. But probably more important recently has been the
invariable summoning
of neoconservatives to represent the „conservative‰ line on the TV
Networks.
Is it unreasonable to suppose that this may be somewhat influenced by
the
famously heavy Jewish role in these operations?
Immigration policy provides a valuable acid test for the proposition the
neoconservatism is actually a vehicle for perceived Jewish ethnic
interests. I
believe I have been able to demonstrate that pro-immigration elements in
American
public life have, for over a century, been largely led, funded,
energized and
organized by the Jewish community [PDF file]. American Jews have taken
this
line, with a few isolated exceptions, because they have believed, as
Leonard S.
Glickman, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, has
bluntly
stated, „The more diverse American society is the safer [Jews] are.‰
Having
run out of Russian Jews, the HIAS is now deeply involved in recruiting
refugees
from Africa.
When, in the middle 1990s an immigration reform movement arose amongst
American conservatives, the reaction of the neoconservatives ranged from
cold to
hostile. No positive voice was permitted on the Op-Ed page of the Wall
Street
Journal, by then a neoconservative domain. (Perhaps significantly, a
more recent
exception has been a relatively favorable review of the anti-illegal
immigration book Mexifornia˜ whose author, the military historian Victor
Davis Hanson,
has distinguished himself by the extreme hawkishness of his views on the
Middle East.) The main vehicle of immigration reform sentiment, National
Review,
once a bastion of traditional conservative thought, was quite quickly
captured
by neoconservatives and its opposition to immigration reduced to
nominal.
Prior to the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of the Middle East, this
suppression of
the immigration reform impulse among conservatives was probably the
single
most important contribution of the neoconservatives to the course of
U.S.
history.
It may yet prove to be the most disastrous.
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