We suffer from ‘neoconitis’ and we badly need a cure. The disease was diagnosed by Roger Cohen in the New York Times. ‘Neocon’, he pointed out, ‘has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian US interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milošević has a place.’
Neoconitis is now ‘as rampant as liberal-lampooning a few years back’. The result? The liberal hawk is now an endangered species, says Cohen.
Joe Lieberman, a Democratic Party vice-presidential candidate in 2000, was drummed out of the Democratic Party in 2007. A Pew Survey found that Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans (55% vs. 27%) to say the US should ‘mind its own business internationally’ and not worry about other countries.
When Democrat Foreign Policy expert Michael O’Hanlon came back from studying the surge in Iraq and wrote an op-ed titled ‘A war that might be won’, he had to leave the Hilary Clinton campaign soon after ‘by mutual consent’.
Closer to home, neoconitis is spreading. John le Carré said his novel Absolute Friends was about‘what would happen if we allow present trends to continue to the point where corporate media are absolutely at the beck and call in the US of a neoconservative group which is commanding the political high ground, calling the shots and appointing the state of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy.’
Seumas Milne dismissed Ed Husain’s 2007 book The Islamist – a penetrating account of extremism in UK Islamist networks – by attacking its author as a ‘poster boy for the neocons’. In the face of mounting evidence of the relative successes of the ‘surge’ in Iraq, the New Statesman editorialised recently that such talk was nothing but ‘neocon’ propaganda.
The left is vulnerable to neoconitis because it takes its cue from what it is against rather than what it is for. In conversation with the Polish anti-Stalinist dissident Adam Michnik in 1993, the liberal philosopher Jurgen Habermas admitted that “he had avoided any fundamental confrontation with Stalinism”. Why, asked Michnik? He did not want ‘applause from the wrong side’ replied Habermas. Parts of the left did not ‘lose their way’ after 9/11. They found their old groove.
Of course we social democrats are not neoconservatives. We differ on the viability and the morality of redistributive social justice, the extent to which the market should be regulated in the pursuit of egalitarianism and environmental sustainability, and the need for a Senian development-as-freedom agenda aimed at making global poverty history. And we also differ on foreign policy. Tony Blair’s social democratic ‘doctrine of the international community’ has been imprisoned inside the narrower ‘Bush Doctrine’.
But Neoconservatism is no conspiracy. As a school of foreign policy it has its roots in the wing of the Democratic party that refused to follow George McGovern, Jimmy Carter and the ‘new politics’ crowd in their embrace of détente and abandonment of antitotalitarianism. Undermining cynical and self-defeating ‘realism’ and embracing democracy-promotion are two of the preconditions for a ‘progressive foreign policy’. To the limited degree we have achieved either, Henry Jackson and the ‘neocons’ can be denied their share of the credit only by doing violence to the historical record.
Neoconitis makes some important truths unavailable to us. It stops us thinking straight or seeing plain the threat we face. When will we realise there are worse things than getting applause from ‘the wrong side’?