Each issue of The Progressive Conscience , a Fleet Street editor looks at the uses and abuses of political terminology. Stephen Pollard explores the meaning of the word ‘neocon’
It’s time once again for that oh-so-fun game. It’s the perennial favourite that requires not a moment’s thought. Yes, it’s time for Neocon Bingo. And this time the focus is Syria.
You win a point for each mention of the word ‘neocon’. As for a prize: well, there isn’t one really. Perhaps a dose of depression at the inability of so many people to engage any part of their brain before opening their mouth.
The game started in 2003, when the US and co. decided to liberate Iraq from Saddam. My mistake. It started in 2001, when the US and co. decided to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban. Oops. Wrong again. It actually started in...
Do you see what I’m doing here? For every tendentiously incorrect use of the word neocon, I can come back with some equally stupid suggestion. Because yes, I know that the US didn’t invade Iraq just to remove Saddam. That was a welcome by-product, just as liberation from the Taliban was a by-product of the invasion of Afghanistan. But you know what? If you’re going to throw around idiotic simplicities then why can’t I join in?
The word neocon has a specific and clear meaning and it’s not what’s meant when ‘the neocons’ are accused of being behind every foreign policy move of the past two decades. Although just about the only thing the origin of the word has in common with current parlance is that it was coined as an insult.
In 1973, Michael Harrington, the US socialist, labelled renegade lefties such as Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Irving Kristol as ‘Neo-Conservatives’. From his perspective, he was right. They were certainly no longer part of the new Democrats, exemplified by George McGovern’s 1972 presidential nomination. Having spent their youth and early adulthood on the mainstream and sometimes Trotskyite left, in the 1960s they rejected the blind alley of New Left thinking taken by much of the Democrat Party. And they saw the counterculture activists who demonstrated against involvement in the Vietnam War as being, in their own way, as anti-American as the Soviet fellow travellers who were anathema to them.
Although most were originally supporters of LBJ’s Great Society, by the 1970s they had started to see its unintended consequences. Welfare was all well and good, for instance, but welfare dependency seemed to be an inevitable and dangerous consequence.
And after Nixon’s détente, which accepted the outrages of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact as inevitable, was followed by Carter’s disastrous foreign policy, it was equally clear that the Democrats had lost the ability or even the wish to stand up for US interests abroad. But they weren’t – yet – conservative, either. They still maintained that the left had left them, rather than vice versa, and worked to bring it back to the electoral mainstream.
They coalesced around the 1972 and 1976 campaigns for the Democratic Presidential nomination of the Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, among whose former employees were the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle. The Henry Jackson Society is named in his honour.
But the battle within the Democratic party was lost. Indeed, it was only with Clinton’s nomination in 1992, as an avowedly New Democrat, that the party genuinely returned to the mainstream. The most pithy explanation of neoconservatism – by the late 1970s the insult had been claimed as a label by its victims – is Irving Kristol’s phrase that a neoconservative is “a liberal who has mugged by reality”.
Those last two words matter. It’s often misquoted as simply a liberal who has been mugged, as if it’s somehow atavistic and simply about base human nature. But the key point is that neoconservatism distances itself from pure ideology – of left or right – precisely because it is a temperament rather than a set of beliefs, that is based on the real world rather than theory and dogma.
That helps to explain the relative ease with which the neocons became allies, if not yet an integral part, of the right. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign worked for them on both levels. It confronted Soviet expansionism and it promised to reverse the domestic decline of the 1970s.
Which, skipping a few decades, brings us to now. There’s a word I haven’t used yet in explaining the origins of the neocons. The J word.
Many – not all – emerged from the New York Jewish milieu. That is significant and deserves an essay to itself (it’s had many). But the real significance today is that it has led to the abuse of the word neocon so far from any meaning based on its history and the thinking of the neocons.
This generation’s neocon bingo is not about neoconservatism. It’s based on using the word as shorthand for Imperialist Jew. In today’s world, such clarity of expression isn’t permitted, because it reveals a latent antisemitism which is no longer thought advisable to reveal. So instead, ‘neocon war’ (and its variations) is used as an acceptable way of saying ‘war fought for Jews’ or ‘war fought for Israel’.
So this autumn, the idea of military action against a dictator who gasses 1400 of his own citizens is dismissed as being a ‘neocon war’ because it’s the Jews behind it, but you can’t actually say that or the Jews will get you. The fact that President Obama isn’t that obviously a Jew is irrelevant. He’s fallen under their (sorry, the neocons’) influence.
And there you have it. The catch-all explanation, based on ignorance and prejudice, and couched in the language of insight.
