The Last Shriek in the Retreat: Neocons Threaten to Leave the Republican Party
Arch neoconservative Robert Kagan looks upon the Trump phenomenon with horror, and has declared his intention to leave the party and vote for Hillary Clinton. He has much company among fellow-neocons, and #NeverTrump has become a thing on Twitter.
I guess Thomas Wolfe was wrong: you really can go home again. The neoconservative movement was begun by an assortment of leftists whose political home was the Democratic Party. They ranged from dyed-in-the-wool Trostskyists (or is it Trotskyites?) to New Deal Democrats. The rise of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s left the soon-to-be-neocons marginalized within the Democratic Party, and they decamped to the Republican Party. Now that they are being marginalized in the Republican Party (such as it is) by a populist uprising, so they are looking to return to their old political home. Not that they will fit in comfortably there, either.
Kagan calls Trump a Frankenstein’s monster. This is rich with irony, because if that’s true, he, and his fellow neocons are Dr. Frankenstein, or at least Igor. The George W. Bush administration represented the neocon ascendency, especially in foreign policy. From that catastrophe was born Obama, and now Trump. The brutal repudiation of Jeb Bush, and the lack of widespread outrage among the hoi polloi at Trump’s borderline-Truther attack on George W., demonstrates how totally the Bushes, and their neocon advisors, have been rejected.
If Kagan et al want to go back to the Democrats, and embrace the Hildabeast, I reply as my grandfather would have: “Here’s your hat. What’s your hurry?” Or, more crudely: “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. I wouldn’t want you to damage the door.”
Why? Well, precisely because neoconservatives are antithetical to the classical liberal, small government, and libertarian types who are also called “conservative” in the American political lexicon.
There are two big points of contrast between neoconservatives and small government conservatives, Jacksonian populists, and other non-neoconservative elements on the right.
Neoconservatives are anti-individualist, and statist. Neoconservatives owe a considerable part of their philosophical foundation to Leo Strauss. Following Strauss, neoconservatives are hostile to individualism, and the natural rights of individuals. Individuals pursuing happiness are merely egotists, and lack virtue. Achieving virtue requires collective projects, carried out through the state, and guided by an elite.
These projects should be pharaonic in scope. In the 2000s, neoconservatives were pushing the “national greatness conservatism” agenda. The goal of policy should not be to promote the betterment of individuals’ lives, but to pursue great projects worthy of a great nation and a great people. New space programs. Massive infrastructure investments. Such projects can only be executed by the Federal government.
Neocon political heroes were men like Teddy Roosevelt–a progressive, remember.
For the neoconservatives, foreign affairs present the greatest opportunity for the pursuit of endeavors worthy of a great nation. Spreading democracy, through regime change and war if necessary, is such an endeavor.
To some, the phrase “war is the health of the state” is a damning criticism. To many neocons, it is anything but. Wars fought in a virtuous cause are a good thing, and require a strong and healthy state.
This, of course, is what impelled Bush foreign policy, and led to its ignominious repudiation among a large majority of Americans. Obama, remember, won primarily by running as the anti-Bush. It would be fair to say that he won by running as the anti-neocon.
In the current campaign, Rubio is the standard bearer for the neocon cause. Trump, and to some degree Cruz, are prospering in large part because of their opposition to that cause.
Neocons are elitist and anti-populist. Again reflecting their Straussian roots, neocons believe that a robust state pursuing grandiose national projects can only be led by an elite. The people are too fickle, too ignorant, and too self-regarding to be trusted to carry out great schemes. But to implement their agenda in a democratic system, neocons have to manipulate public opinion, in part by telling different “truths” to different groups.
One remarkable tell of this elitism is immigration policy. Kagan and other major neoconservatives (e.g., Jon Podhoretz) adamantly support open borders. (Keep that in mind when you parse what Rubio has to say on immigration.) Opposition to unlimited immigration has been the singlemost important issue in galvanizing Trump’s support.
Robert Kagan and his cabal find themselves in their current straits because of the disastrous effects of big government elitism. Again, the catastrophe of the Bush years, which began with a disastrous intervention in Iraq and ended with a financial crisis, utterly discredited the self-anointed elite. Interventions during the Obama years–notably in Libya–that neoconservatives strongly supported only cemented the popular revulsion.
And said people are rising up, pitchfork and torches in hand, with Trump at their head, to storm the neocon castle. Further evidence of the cluelessness of Kagan and his ilk, they don’t understand that in the popular mind they are Dr. Frankenstein. If the neoconservatives don’t like the current political environment, they have primarily themselves to blame. It is in large part a reaction to them, and what they wrought.
In some respects, it is remarkable that neoconservatives (whom Reagan did not like) and small/smallish-government types were able to coexist in the same party for so long. But the stresses that have accumulated in fifteen years of foreign policy failure and economic malaise are too much for whatever bonds held these disparate groups together to hold. So Kagan and his fellow neocons will go their own way, and will not be missed. If they are perceived as being instrumental in putting Hillary in the White House, they will be the target of even more enmity by those they left behind.
The fundamental fact is this. In the Republican Party or out of it, neoconservatives are not friends of individual liberty and a modest, constrained state. To the contrary, they are its enemies. Whatever else the Trump movement accomplishes, it has already succeeded in forcing the neoconservatives to drop their Straussian deceptions and reveal their true beliefs: a big state and an interventionist foreign policy that is more than comfortable with using war to achieve their messianic purpose.